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Hello Amanda!
The final step is going cold turkey. Everything you learn about sleep goes out the window. Return to basics. Going to bed when sleepy. But that automatically means sleeping less which actually builds and strengthens sleep drive, and that makes sleeping much more likely to happen not less.
Think of it like this. Do you obsess over your own breathing? Or your heart pumping? Why won’t you start worrying if your body has somehow forgotten how to do the basics? This is exactly what you are doing about your sleep. You doubt your own body can’t do it automatically, or your organs have suddenly all forgotten how to do their jobs and now need all these pills to “refresh” its “memory”. How absurd is that.
Take the leap of faith. Stop doing anything for sleep. Stop being overprotective of it, what you are doing is actually reinforcing your insomnia. Going to bed at regular times is all you need, nothing else.
If your body wants to sleep, it will sleep. For example, if you starve for days, will your body suddenly refuse to eat when a table of scrumptious dishes is laid before it? Of course not. Similarly, your body won’t refuse to sleep on a comfortable bed if it is really starved of it! It is as simple as that. Stop making it complicated. Confront your fears head on and stop running away from it. Sleep is actually that simple and EFFORTLESS. Good luck.
Hello @neleh72!
Thank you for your question. I do recommend you to go to you-tube and look up this video “Talking Insomnia #39” about an interview between Daniel and Sasha Stephens, a 15 year and now recovered insomniac.
I do not wish to speak at length because I think I have spoken quite enough from my interactions with @etty. But I will repeat that most insomnia has an mental origin and therefore require mental response. My key advice would be:
1. Try to do NOTHING about it except keeping to a regular bedtime schedule. Because there is nothing to fix.
2. Be very patient and expect ups and downs. Give it all the time you need for everything to settle down.You are your own worst enemy when it comes to your insomnia. You are getting in the way of peaceful sleep, by doing all kinds things for sleep or at the very least, plainly becoming afraid. But that fear is conditioned and you can slowly learn to “unfear” it. I wish you the best.
Hey yeah, so I went through your post history.
Your story does ring a bell because it is so similar to mine and practically everyone else’s who have been through this journey.
Waking up earlier than you desire is an extremely common symptom of, well, sleeping well and recovery. Like I said, it happened to me also. So I started letting go, and my go to bed time got dragged out to later as well. Because I was sleeping so well, my body was needing less and less of it! So naturally, I went to bed later once I stopped doing the srt thing and I wasn’t feeling sleepy anytime before midnight. Because I was sleeping later, my wakeup time got dragged out to later as well. So now I have a super relaxed sleep schedule, I go to bed anytime between midnight and 1am, and get out anytime between 7-8am. Just lose the tracking and the whole thing will settle down by itself.
The final step of the way is truly and totally letting go. Maybe you don’t need to do anything at all. Your body just doesn’t need to sleep until 7-8 am or whatever time you have set it. For me, I always woke up at 4-5 am early in my recovery journey, now, I can barely get out at 8 or 9! That problem totally solved itself once I ignored it.
Hi @buddy370
Welcome to the club! If you would allow me to share my input, I would say recovery is really only a matter of perspective. Once you stop defining what is “good” or “bad” sleep based on whatever definitions you have come to set yourself, that sleep is just sleep, there’s just no good or bad, then technically you have recovered literally overnight.
Unfortunately, it is not that straightforward for many people. There will be emotional hurdles and setbacks. Your conditioned mind will keep plaguing you with all kinds of things. You will need to learn how respond to them, to make light of them, reframing unhelpful and unhealthy thoughts, and eventually totally ignore them altogether, which require a bit of time. Good luck.
I also might want to add that when I was doing srt with martin, it was at the height of the covid pandemic! So it was much worse for me and others in the same plight cos not only we had to contend with our own deeply seated fears, we also had to deal with a massive public health crisis where fear of contagion and deaths were happening everywhere. There was a public curfew in place and hospital visits to see healthcare professionals were severely curtailed. But that didn’t stop me from recovering, did it? Nope. It’s not fair that you are accusing me of pointless rambling. When I’m trying to tell you what you need to know to beat this thing! Cos I’ve been there, and done it all and I know what it’s all about.
No, there you made a mistake. I signed up for Martin’s course back in 2020. I did the full 8 week sleep restriction thing. I still kept my sleep journals but since thrown them away, cos they don’t really matter when I’ve moved on way beyond. Look under my handle chee2308, it says client. Yours doesn’t so I’m not sure what kind of sleep restriction are you doing or whether it’s supervised by any qualified therapist. But like I said, these are not important in the long run.
Following a plan like sleep restriction to the tee does not and will not guarantee results. I still had bad nights when I was doing it, still did even after I graduated and even now, I still have them very occasionally, although I can’t really remember when was my last. But as I said, I don’t care how I sleep anymore and that’s why I keep sleeping so well! I regularly do 7-9 hours night, I even nap occasionally. So I know what I’m talking about and if you read those testimonials of people who have succeeded in overcoming their insomnia, adoption of a nonchallant and indifferent trait is very often a crucial factor for success. It will be for you too if you want to overcome this. You will need to get out of your comfort zone, reexamine everything, experiment what seems uncomfortable or unnatural to you at first. Only then will you begin to chip away years and decades of die-hard, erroneous sleep beliefs that are not only unhelpful but are extremely destructive behaviors that actually reinforce your insomnia. I wish you the best.
If you truly understand that sleep is uncontrollable, in fact, you won’t be asking any questions at all, because what is there to ask? Your sleep has a life of its own, independent of what you do, think or ask.
The fact you are asking only mean two things. You are still afraid (of poor sleep), so yes, you will most likely continue to suffer from sporadic bouts of insomnia as long as there’s fear. And yes, you want that 15mins. So go ahead, take the 15mins and be done with it. Forget about any repercussions or consequences, because as you already understood, you CAN’T control sleep. Be brave. Take it and see what happens. If you manage to get more sleep, good. If you don’t, you can always roll it back, no big deal.
Hello @etty
It is always the obsession over the smallest detail that causes the greatest misery. If your sleep efficiency was 84.999% should you take that extra 15mins or not? Your mind will continue to plague you with these types of “dilemmas”. And once one is resolved, another one crops up and another and another and so on to infinitum. It’s a never ending struggle and if you continue to play these kinds of mental games with your own brain, you will continue to suffer needlessly.
The best sleep is that which have ZERO restrictions. No longer obsessing over quantity, quality, duration, sleep restriction, sleep efficiency or whatever kind of jargon you or the so called sleep experts come up with. Go back to your original self. When you did not have insomnia, were you overly obsessed with these things? It may have been a long time ago, but always try to repeat what you did pre-insomnia. Did you do sleep restriction? Did you keep a sleep diary and take a tally? Did you have a strict sleep bedtime schedule? Did you do all kinds of sleep rituals? Did you take meds? Etc etc etc. In probably ALL these cases, NO. By introducing unnecessary hurdles like these, you only set yourself up for unnecessary disappointments when you fail to achieve any or all of them, which is completely natural because they are too restrictive!
Like I said, forget all the RULES. That’s the end goal of sleep restriction. The real victory is not sleeping well forever, it is in banishing the fear of poor sleep, that’s when people truly sleep really well. It is when you completely flip the problem on itself that you truly get over your insomnia. Good luck.
Hello @etty!
Welcome to the forum. Your question is a very typical one for someone who just started some kind of sleep therapy like sleep restriction, for example.
As someone who has seen and done it all, starting back in 2020, the question of whether adding 15 mins is not really that important imo. What is:
1. What is your purpose of doing sleep restriction? Do you use as some kind of a sleep generator, ie, inducing more sleep than what your body needs? If this is the case, you will be quite disappointed to hear it doesn’t work like this. Nothing induces more sleep other than your body itself. It is in total control not you. The purpose of sleep restriction, aka sleep reorganization, is just to make your body much more likely fall asleep in an allocated window, ie, sleep window, that fits your schedule. It will not make you sleep more than is necessary for your body to function.
2. What is truly the big deal about whether you should add 15mins? What are you really afraid of? Slipping back into insomnia? Then it is poor sleep you are truly afraid about, not whether to add that 15mins or not. Often times like these, it is fear of poor sleep itself that makes you harder to doze off. People are essentially losing sleep over sleep.
Sleep is not a consciously controllable mechanism so worrying about it is essentially unnecessary and counterproductive. Have a thought about this and decide what’s best for you. If you prefer to spend an extra 15 mins in bed and not caring how it might affect future sleep, please go ahead.
Sleep works exactly like hunger, the more you deprive yourself of it, the more you are likely to get it. It is as simple as that and not some black mysterious indecipherable box that you must figure out, sleep is really that simple, it just comes from sufficient accumulated wakefulness. Most people get adequately sleepy from 16-18 hours of continued wakefulness. Let go of your preconceived notions and do it naturally. You came into this world with the innate ability of sleeping, no special skill or knowledge is required and this time is no different. Good luck.
Hi @Ingis
Welcome to the club! Of finding out that it doesn’t take a lot of effort to sleep. Anyone can sleep even with a bit of anxiety. Letting your body take over is key. By that, I mean, don’t count sheeps, or try to wish away insomniac thoughts, or even if your mind still can’t let it go, then fine, think sleep thoughts. It really doesn’t matter what you think or do. Just be natural and let your mind wonder. The veil between being conscious and falling asleep is really, really thin. Nobody knows or will know when that flipover happens, it just happens so just by closing your eyes and letting your mind drift off usually does the trick every single time. That is why it is possible for everyone to heal from this, because if everyone needs 0% anxiety in order to sleep, then nobody would have made it and everyone would be crowding up just to see a bunch of sleep specialists all over the place.
Bad nights are a big part of any insomniac’s recovery journey. It toughens you up to face them better because it shows that not sleeping well for one or two nights is actually quite harmless and even normal. You can still get on with your day without much problems. As your fears lessen, bad nights bother you less and eventually they just stop bothering you altogether. The real recovery isn’t sleeping well all the time. It is in not fearing poor sleep anymore. By not fearing it, that’s when you actually start sleeping well. Good luck.
As a successfully recovered insomniac, I can attest to the following fundamental truths about most, if not all, insomnia cases:
1. The best help is no help.
2. The best remedy is no remedy.
3. The best strategy is no strategy.The sooner you quit trying to fight your insomnia, the sooner insomnia leaves you alone.
Ultimately, you must be open to the idea that you might sleep badly and being okay. It’s that mental struggle against it that is enough to keep you awake. You are essentially losing sleep over sleep itself. This whole thing feeds on your obsession. Cut off the obsession, and it just dies away.
One day when you’ve recovered, come back and post your success story and you will find it’s not much different from so many others who’ve also recovered and they all typically share the same basic ingredients I just outlined. Good luck.
Hello @Ingis!
The gold standard to follow is to do exactly what you did when you couldn’t sleep BEFORE you had insomnia.
There must be multiple episodes in your life when you couldn’t sleep. Maybe some of those times were when you intentionally even want to remain awake, such as studying for an important exam, the night before your wedding, attending important interview, or giving an important presentation or even when you were out clubbing with your friends and having a blast. So what makes this time different??
The answer is usually, not a whole lot, nothing changed really. Your mind is just more focused about sleep this time than all the others.
So the question now really is: so how do I get back to the past when I don’t really care so much about how I sleep? Answer: Do exactly what you did before. Forget about sleep! You are alive now, so what is the proof of this? Well not being asleep or wanting to sleep all the time is that proof. Who wants to sleep all the time? Sick people. Or dead people. Why worry about sleep now, as you still have a life to live, versus much later when you are guaranteed to get unlimited amounts of it anyways? Think about that for a moment. Good luck.
Hello @bantu!
I assume you are a young mother probably in your twenties or early thirties? If you hadn’t needed any kinds of meds to sleep all these years ago, there is absolutely no reason why you need them now all of sudden either, imho. The human body (and mums are tough some more) just doesn’t fail catastrophically suddenly like that, if it did, then you are probably in a lot worse shape, maybe even lying unconscious in the hospital by now. The fact you are not, and even have the desire to come here, read all these posts and write legibly and rationally about your dilemma suggests you are in way better shape than you think or even what your doctors are telling you.
I suggest just get off the forum for now. Try it for a week or two. Stop researching sleep or doing anything about it or at least resist the temptation. Set a timeline to reduce your meds (expect disruptions at first but these will eventually settle down). Also set your bed schedule, get into at X and out at Y and stick with it. Of course, as a young mother, you will probably need to wake up more than you’ll want, tending to your baby. Expect this to happen, as do all mothers, so always be kind and compassionate to yourself. Focus on your daily tasks, I’m sure you have a ton as a mum. Whenever sleep thoughts bothers you, take a deep breath, and acknowledge them instead of trying to escape them and just tell yourself, “Yes I know, but let me finish this task first, I’ll sleep when
the time comes. I trust my body will give me the rest I need.” Then return your attention to the tasks you were doing. Over time, people just become better at handling their emotions and the ups and downs. I don’t expect you to be different either.Remember that whatever you are going through now, there are plenty of people who have gone through it all and emerge from the other side, tougher and stronger. So you are not really alone in all this, if these people could do it, then why couldn’t you? People are often stronger than they think, and you are no different.
Remember you are really only afraid of a set of your own thoughts. And thoughts are just that. Just thoughts, they can’t really do anything unless you act on them and wind up doing something drastic. And because of that, you can often adjust your level of response to them. People eventually get over their biggest fears over time. They just do and that’s what makes us humans. As a recovered insomniac, I’m telling you sleep is not worth even spending one milligram of your effort on it. It is something that fixes itself. Good luck and focus on being a great mum instead!
