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Hey Kjs16
I don’t have good or bad nights, I just have nights, if that makes sense!
I go to bed at bedtime. I have no idea when I fall asleep. I wake up when baby cries. I browse Facebook for way too long. Then I put my phone away and close my eyes. Then it’s morning again.
Sometimes I’m not that tired at bedtime. Or I wake up at 4am somehow full of energy. I just browse Facebook mindlessly for a bit until I get sleepy or bored. Then I close my eyes again and let myself drift. I always have my phone on hand at night to entertain me if I’m awake. Nothing is more boring than lying in bed, not sleepy enough for sleep, with nothing to do. So thank God there’s Facebook and the internet. I know, blue light is bad. But it doesn’t really bother me, so….yeah xD
One thing I learned from my insomnia journey is:
Sleep is not the escape from insomnia.
The escape from insomnia is the acceptance of being awake when your body isn’t ready to sleep. Acceptance of being brain dead the next day. Acceptance of having those obnoxious, illogical, catastrophic sleep thoughts randomly firing through your head throughout the day (“What if I don’t sleep tonight. What if I don’t sleep ever again. What if I lose my job because I can’t sleep. What if… what if…sleep sleep sleep sleep SLEPTWERJSDL:FKJSD:LKj)
But you can’t practice that acceptance without actually being in the situation of not ready to sleep and being brain dead the next day, right?So, to cure sleep anxiety and therefore insomnia in the long term…is to just have more insomnia LOL.
If you can desensitize yourself to being okay with being awake, okay with being tired, okay with being scared of never sleeping again…your sleep will fix itself.
There is never such a thing as a bad night. There’s only desensitization practice haha!
Hi Ksenja
You will ABSOLUTELY get here one day! Sooner than you think!
You’ve already got a great mindset!
Let me tell you this – you’re a completely NORMAL sleeper who is doing your best to meet the unpredictable, stressful demands of being on-call to a BABY 24/7.
YOU ARE NORMAL!
Think about this… do cats and dogs get insomnia? No! If they’re tired, they lay down. If they’re not tired, they get up. They probably have no idea that they sleep at all – and yet they’re the best sleepers! I bet they never think, “I need to sleep now or I’ll be too tired to go to the dog park tomorrow!” They just go…. “Hmmmm me tired…me lie down…rest…ahhhh so nice….zzzzz.”
That’s where humans get it wrong. We sleep when we think we SHOULD sleep. We treat sleep like it’s another job we do, a responsibility we bear with big consequences for failing. GOSH no wonder why we struggle to sleep!
Let’s be more like our cats and dogs. Just sleep whenever. It’s no big deal.
Hi Ksenija
Congrats on your baby boy!!!
I feel like insomnia is almost guaranteed with new mums because babies are the biggest sleep disrupter of all time!
CBTI is great isn’t it! It absolutely can help you get back to normal thinking patterns around sleep again.
The biggest turning point in my recovery was realising that I never had a problem with sleeping, I just had a huge fear of being awake while the baby was asleep.
Once I addressed this fear of being awake, my anxiety lessened and my sleep regulated.
These days I barely think about sleep.
I even nap a lot during the day, a big no-no in insomnia land haha!
I LOVE sleeping. I love my bed.
Because I don’t fight my body when I go to bed. I listen to it, I trust it, and I just let go.
If I’m not ready to sleep, that’s totally fine too, it’s 2am Youtube bingeing time hehe!Thank you, Chee2308!
Yes, the real game changer in the insomnia journey is to care less about our thoughts!
Thoughts are just thoughts. They don’t mean much.When my brain tells me, “You need to worry about sleep more.”
I reply, “Why? I have no problems sleeping. And even if I do, worrying about it doesn’t help.”
Brain, “Sleep makes you anxious. And if something makes you anxious, you are in danger. You must get out of danger. DO SOMETHING.”
Me, “Really? Can’t we just be okay with being anxious and not do anything to fix it?”
Brain, “Of course not! Problems need to be fixed!”
Me, “I disagree. Some problems are better left untouched.”
Brain, “Well, what if I give you LOADS OF ANXIETY about this. More than you have ever had in your life!”
Me, “Mmmmm cortisol. Keeping me stressed about real and imaginary dangers since 1993.”
Brain, “……….imaginary dangers?”
Me, “Mhmmm.”
Brain, “Oh!!!!!!”I didn’t “snap” myself out of worrying about sleep overnight.
It takes a long time for your brain to unlearn the thought patterns and associations around a perceived threat.
Insomnia is a negative feedback loop.
You get scared of not sleeping. Which makes you more scared. Which makes you less likely to sleep. Which makes you more scared of not sleeping.
The only way to break that loop is to be okay with NOT sleeping.
You have to be okay with NOT being okay, to be okay. LOL it’s confusing and counter-intuitive but honestly it works.
These days I honestly don’t have a single F to give about whether I sleep or not, EVER in my life.
If I think a sleep-anxiety related thought, I just laugh it off. It’s my brain still pinging me about stupid useless crap.
I taught myself to love the sensation of being brain dead the next day because I trust that eventually I will pass out from excessive sleep drive.
When I do sleep, I don’t get excited anymore. It’s just sleep, dude, it’s no big deal. My body can digest food. My body can sleep. My body can do loads of things.
It’s really none of my business what it decides to do. 🙂 My job is just to be a good mum to my daughter and enjoy my life, no matter how brain dead I am haha!
Hey Sleepworry!
It was super hard to shift my mentality too, because my severe postnatal depression basically stemmed from my inability to sleep.
There were many days that I could only lie on the floor, physically unable to meet my crying baby’s demands.
Why?
Because I couldn’t sleep.
I was constantly irritated and angry. I had massive arguments with people I loved. I pushed away everyone that was close to me, to breaking point.
Because I couldn’t sleep.
I was spiraling out of control. I was unable to be a good mother, a good friend, a good daughter.
I basically became non-functional in every aspect of my life.
All because I couldn’t sleep.
And yet, no matter how hard I tried, I JUST COULDN’T SLEEP.
I HAD TO SLEEP. But I couldn’t.
Even when I slept, I was so scared that I wouldn’t sleep the next night. Or the next. Or the next….
I HAD TO SLEEP OR EVERYTHING WOULD BE RUINED.
……… Can you see where I went wrong? 😉
I also want to add – I am a professional musician, and I realised that sleep anxiety so similar to performance anxiety for music performance.
If you obsess about delivering a perfect performance, about what people will think of you if you completely bomb the performance, about fighting the performance anxiety…. You’re gonna have a bad time.
But if you focus on enjoying sharing the music and just enjoy moment, then you’ll paradoxically actually deliver a more secure, authentic performance and you’ll definitely enjoy the experience of being on stage more.
Same for sleep.
If the focus of bedtime is to sleep, about fighting the sleep anxiety, wondering why you can’t sleep, dreading the next day on zero sleep, wishing you can be asleep, then you’re gonna have a bad time.
But if the primary goal of bedtime is to relax, to enjoy the sensation of lying down, to feel comfortable, to unwind, to daydream, to snuggle into your blanket, to rest with zero expectation of any sleep whatsoever, then paradoxically sleep actually does happen more often than not.
But you can’t make sleep the primary goal. The primary goal of going to bed is enjoying the heck out of your bed. If you do sleep, it is nice but not expected.It’s kind of like happiness, too. The harder you search for it, the more elusive it becomes.
There are some problems in life that we don’t need to solve ourselves.
Just appreciate the moment and just trust that over time the rest will sort itself out. x
