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Yes. Even normal sleepers get transient insomnia. There is no big deal. Move on with your life. Sleep works itself out. You don’t need to do anything.
I would get off any meds too if I were you. Anything that causes you to doubt your own sleep ability automatically reinforces insomnia. The mindset that insomnia must be avoided at all costs actually causes it.
When people recover, they don’t necessarily sleep well all the time. It just means they are no longer fearful of insomnia. And that is the ultimate cure. Not fearing anymore. Not endlessly trying to control it. Stop this fight from within. Ultimately, who is the enemy? Who gave you insomnia? Nobody except yourself. The problem comes from within and it should end from within. Nothing external including any meds is really required. You just need to change your mindset. Best wishes to you.
Hi @sudu
You are absolutely right to question whether doing something is necessary for sleep. Because it will be discovered in the end, it is really not. Sleep is natural and effortless just like eating and breathing.
If you think your sleep is fine, then there’s no need to self-impose a set of sleep rules that you must follow. Because whatever you do or don’t, you will still sleep when your body wants it and won’t when it doesn’t.
Congratulations on being a parent and best wishes to you and your new born.
I enjoy taking occasional afternoon naps to stave off early evening sleepiness.
But I know that’s probably taboo because you’ve been told no naps, etc etc. All this rhetoric just to protect your nocturnal sleep.
But I am super relaxed about my sleep and I don’t mind feeling sleepy later or sleeping a bit less at night. Because I don’t fear poor sleep and am super relaxed about my sleep rules, I continue to sleep well.
You have several options really, you could
1. do the naps,
2. go to bed at 8-9 pm when you feel sleepy but expect to wake up earlier too, OR
3. do nothing and continue to fight the sleepiness. Actually feeling sleepiness is a surefire sign that your sleep system still works.Hello @edgar
Thank you for your response and I appreciate it. Tough love is the greatest love.
I am sorry to hear about your health problems. But any case, I still encourage everyone to live a full and balanced life whatever their conditions. Because ultimately, we can’t control what afflicts us. But we can control how we live our lives. Living well in spite of daunting circumstances is graceful and elegant, in my opinion.
It is always possible to find perfection in a sea of imperfections. Indeed, it is because life is imperfect that it is actually perfect. Because it allows us to truly grow, mature and appreciate. Best wishes to you and Teresa.
Hi Paul!
So why do you get out of bed after only minutes? Is it not possible to just enjoy the bed, feel the soft sheets against your skin or close your eyes, think good thoughts and allow your mind to drift off until you have unknowingly fallen asleep? I do this every night and I fall asleep without fail.
Hello Daniel,
Thank you for sharing. I like your suggestions but what about the pills, do you intend to take them for life or will you begin a tapering program with consultation with your medical professionals to start reducing the dosage until you are off completely?
Breaking your fingers eh… And then when you start zooming out to look at the bigger picture, you begin realizing it’s actually your other hand that’s doing the breaking. Interesting analogy though.
Any insomnia struggle is almost always self-induced and self-inflicted. Leave it alone and it leaves you alone. If sleep ability is completely lost, you would have ZERO sleep all the time and you won’t last very long either, the average being 18 months. These sufferers would often suffer many symptoms such as unable to speak coherently let alone get into a forum like this and type a ton of stuff complete with excellent grammar and punctuation! They would also have trouble walking even let alone show up at work, take a paycheck to take care of your family. The fact you are still around despite decades of “suffering” strongly suggests your sleep ability is fine, there was nothing wrong to begin with and therefore nothing to fix. Trying to fix an inexistent problem becomes the problem.
Hi ktMD
If situations like these, it’s always appropriate to recall back what you did when you couldn’t sleep during your pre-insomnia days. Surely, insomnia episodes are not new, there will have been multiple instances in the past when you found you couldn’t sleep but still hadn’t started identifying it as a problem. Then just continue doing that. The goal of insomnia recovery is always to go back to basics and to revert to your somewhat ignorant self because ignorance is bliss when it comes to insomnia.
Hi @Teresa333
May I ask you a very simple question? So why are you so extremely obsessed with sleep?
Hello ktMD
Your question really is how resistant are you to change. And how sensitive you are to this change.
For example, how did you change from being nonchalant about sleep early in life to being obsessed about it that it becomes the main focus in your life.
I guess it also depends on your personality. How observant are you in recognizing this change and how resistant you are to these changes. Your personality definitely shapes your response. If you accept that change happens all the time, and that everything about you, your physical and mental states including your thoughts change all the time and that everything is really transitory and so you should adapt to these changes and not react explosively to them, then you will do very well indeed and insomnia will pass you by like a breeze and not stay very long.
There was an excellent post about a young mum being 100% cured from her postpartum insomnia, which I think you can get some inspiration:
Best wishes and congratulations on being a parent.
In future, you probably won’t care.
You are only truly “cured” when these things don’t bother you. Not caring whether sleeping well or bad. You simply don’t care.The key to sleeping well is letting go of complete control. You can’t control when thunderstorms happen either or when or what woke you up.
Any lack of sleep will be recovered eventually. You will always get it back plus more!
Because any one night is not the only night you’ll sleep. You will sleep again next night, the night after and so on for decades. So plenty of opportunities for sleep down the road ahead.
When you eventually recover, you will never get enough! Eight, nine, ten hours and still feel you could sleep more. Because you feel so relaxed and don’t pressure yourself, that’s when the sleep keeps coming.
Also, I will stop responding to you, because I think I have said enough. Saying more won’t help any further. The rest is up to you. Good luck!
Dear Anni
Yes it sounds hard now but it does get easier as times goes on.
Allow yourself to feel the fear. Do not seek to escape anymore. Only then will you get used to it. Any fear, no matter how large, becomes less the more you get exposed to it.
In the end, you will realize it’s all just your own set of thoughts. All you’ve been afraid of, essentially, is just your own thoughts. Literally fear mongering yourself. That is one part of the recovery but the most important. The other part is the sleep itself, which is effortless. It requires nothing from you and needs no effort. Good luck!
