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@ borgesbi – yeah, I miss weekend sleep-ins, too. Now it doesn’t matter if it is the weekend or not, 5:00 o’clock (more or less) it is.
@ martin
My sleep is kinda all over the place, but usually between 5 and 6 hours a day. I think I’m getting more and more used to it by now, so even though I’m tired, I can manage.
It is the random 2 hour night that gets to me and I have to let off some steam here.
I have MS for about 10 years and epilepsy for 4 years, both of which affect my energy levels and for both conditions, especially epilepsy, it would be great if I could sleep sufficiently. This probably subconsciously adds to the tension I sometimes feel. And again, makes me kinda nervous about screwing around (sorry, couldn’t think of a better expression 🙁 ) with the 5-6 hours that I manage to get. I know SR would mean a lot of 0-2 hour nights for some time.
Thanks for explaning about the internal body clock. It really is one for Ripley’s Believe it or Not.
Hi, Borgesbi,
Sorry for the late response.
Thank you for your reply, I really appreciate you taking the time.
I agree about the subconscious mind being behind all this. I wish sleep was like people used to think – you pass out, nothing happens for 8 hours, you wake up. And you’re right, it’s so easy to get the sleep system out of whack. But how the subconscious knows EXACTLY what time it is will have to remain a mistery, I guess.
Thank you for explaining about CBT. So it is normal to feel even more tense at the beginning of the protocol.
I keep meaning to try it, and when a particularly bad night hits I’m sure I want to, but then I get a couple of okay nights and I go back to my usual “better not even think about this.”
I am glad Martin’s site exists, and it’s there if I need it. I’m a teacher, and summer holidays are coming, so I’ll try to relax more and see if it helps. Then, if it fails, I know CBT is always an option.
I have another question I’ve been meaning to ask, so instead of posting a separate thread maybe I could post it here.
Does anyone else feel tension when trying to sleep? I feel no tension when I go to sleep at night, but I do sometimes feel tense when I wake up too early and try to go back to sleep, and I ALWAYS feel tense if I try to nap. It doesn’t take long for the tension to develop, I lie in bed for about 20-30 min, and if I’m not asleep by then I get very tense and even angry, for no reason I can think of, except the fact that I’m not sleeping.
That is the main reason I doubt CBT would work for me, so I don’t even try. I highly, highly doubt that getting up and doing something until I feel sleepy would work for me. Doing something actively to get to sleep reminds me of trying to nap, I would probably get tense as soon as I went back to bed.
I think all in all that I developed hyperarousal around sleep during the course of my life, and that hyperarousal prevents me from napping and feeling relaxed when trying to go back to sleep.
I fall asleep immediately in the night. I wake up about 5 hours later. I don’t struggle to stay awake during the day, I’m tired as hell but not sleepy.
I think my biggest mistake is that no, I don’t get up immedjately after waking. I know I should, but I just can’t. I keep my eyes closed or pop a pill until at least 6,6:30, even if I wake around 5.
Thanks for your advice. Perhaps I will try SR one of these days, I’m just not ready yet.
Hi Deb,
I realize that, yes, but if there is a combo that might work, I am not afraid of pills. Anything is better than no sleep or poor sleep. However, my GP recommended some young guy who is anti-drugs, so maybe I will end up on a CBT-like program after all.
Martin’s course, with all due respect,is a bit pricey for me. 500 USD is almost my monthly salary! I’m sure Martin is among the best in his field, but I will try this local doctor first (he is free 🙂 ).
As for the free course, I’m sure that’s OK, too, but I would still rather like to first try a face-to-face conversation, and perhaps run some tests.
Thanks, Martin.
I’ll take it one step a time. Maybe the regular pshychiatrist can refer me to a specialist in a bigger city.
As for last night, it took 4 Valiums to take me out. I have to try to find some exercise or something. And I have to find out why I wake up soon after falling asleep.
Anyway, next step, pshychiatrist.
So, been to the doc, didn’t really get any advice, only a referal to a pshychiatrist. I guess there’s no avoiding that.
We’ll see what happens after my talk with the shrink, though I don’t expect much. There isn’t even such a thing as a psychiatrist who specializes in sleep, only regular psychiatrists, specialized exclusively in depression from what I can tell.
I think I can already say that us poor sleepers just have to make peace with the fact that our lives will forever suck in that area. Sorry for the pessimism, I just can’t believe my life has come to this…
I think that’s basically everybody’s problem here. You’re not alone. I wish we were robots with an on/off switch.
Hi, Martin, sorry for the late response, it was a busy week.
I don’t know what’s keeping me awake when I wake up early. Sometimes I feel a little anxious, bit most of the time I just don’t feel sleepy, I guess.
I’ve never been someone who drifts to sleep easily. That’s why I can’t nap even though I have the time. That’s why I don’t snooze in cars or trains, for instance. I remember travelling from Venice to Croatia one time by bus in High school,a 7 hour trip, everyone in my class was sleeping like crazy but I stayed up the whole trip. Same for when I flew from Croatia to the US on one occasion, a 15 hour trip and I didn’t sleep a wink.
My conditions for sleep are, for whatever reason, biologically dictated or perhaps conditioned somewhere early in my life. Unless I take pills, I can fall asleep exclusively in bed, at night,and it doesn’t seem to matter if I stared at screens before or doing anything generally considered harmful for sleep. I fall asleep very quickly, too, most of the time as soon as my head touches the pillow.
To answer your second question, before my night sleep began to suffer, I would sleep from around 23 to about 7 or 8. Now it’s from around 23 to 2 or 3, then I take a pill, then if the pill works I manage to sleep until 5 or 5:30.
Honestly I don’t think some special form of SR would help me since I have essentiallly been following SR my whole life.
I guess there is a touch of OCD in all this, I feel that if I actively got up and waited to feel sleepy, and then went to bed, my brain would say “nope, nice try but you can’t fool me.” I just have to keep doing what I’ve been doing, but find a way to get back to sleeping until at least 6, 6:30, hopefully seven.
As for CBT, I don’t know. Maybe, I have to explore it further. Bit I will have that chat with my doctor first.
I’ve already written about my first bout of insomnia. I guess I beat it by my own kind of ACT, I learned not to fret too much about it and it went away.
This new problem is worse because, while I still follow the “don’t worry” approach and it still works to put me to sleep initially, my sleep doesn’t LAST long enough anymore. In the past all I needed was to make sure I fall asleep, after which staying asleep was never a problem. I can’t figure out why this happens. Waking uo too early is more common in the elderly population, for various reasons, but like I said I’m only 31. Why do I sleep like I’m 81…
Thanks, Aiva, fot your words of support. I really need them, I feel down.
I’ve been on Valium for way too long, but the problem is my early awakening started much before I decided to help myself with Valium. Then,after about 3-4 months I went ahead and tried it.
But yes, it’s certainly gone for the worse, I’ve gone from using it sporadically to using it every night. I don’t think it even has a function anymore, I think it’s just placebo at this point. So I will switch from that to something else, probably.
You are absolutely right about the mind being behind all this. So many people look for organic causes, hoping to find something that can be fixed, and now I will start looking for one, though I’m pretty sure there’s nothing organic behind it.
Still, worth a look.
How is your sleep these days then? Do you use any medication?
<p style=”text-align: left;”>Also, how does one get officially diagnosed with insomnia? Is it enough to just tell the doctor your history or are there tests done to rule out other causes?</p>
God, I have so many questions now that I’ve made up my mind to grab this f***ing bull by the horns.I still can’t tell if what I have is insomnia, anxiety or both. If it was just insomnia, I would feel that almost irresistable urge to doze off like most of you do, and have trouble getting to the night without napping. But not me, I’m tired, but I’m not sleepy. My brain is always on high alert, and there is no chance I would,for instance, fall asleep at the wheel. Then night comes, I pass out, and wake up with my eyes wide open. Does anybody else feel that way?
Learning to stop worrying helped me a lot in the past, when I would be anxious about sleep and dreading the night all day.
Until one day I simply said “enough, I will accept as much sleep as I get, and try to live my life as if I didn’t have insomnia”. Little by little my fear/anxiety over insomnia diminished.
So it’s a good mindset to adopt, if you can. Doesn’t work for me anymore, sadly, but it can help many people who have something of a “fear of insomnia”.
Hi, Steve,
Well,let’s call the negative result a good result. Hope you get to the bottom of it.
Man, I love this thread, thanks guys.
Yes, ‘tired but wired” is the right expression, and especially so since these early morning awakenings began. Before that,my weird inability to nap actually had a silver lining to it, it made me kinda follow a sleep restriction protocol of my own. I never needed to be told to “avoid naps”, sadly I did that on my own.
I agree with what you say, Martin. I would never fall asleep at the wheel, because I don’t get sleepy, just fatigued. I remember reading about a doctor who said that she would rather sit behind a wheel with an insomniac on 2 hrs of sleep than with a normal sleeper who had 6 hrs of sleep. It’s strange, but they’re definitely two different feelings. Sleepy is pleasant, fatigued is rough. Perhaps there really is some truth behind the claim that our genes hold the key, i.e. that our (insomniacs) ancestors were the ones in charge of keeping watch on the tribe and that this trait is now locked in our genes? Certainly an interesting theory.
Martin, I have to say, whereas I do agree that there is no evidence that sleep deprivation can do harm, I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. But I imagine it would be accumulated , long-term harm in the form of an earlier stroke than usual, say.
I do not worry too much about my health, though I suffer from both MS and epilepsy . I am more concerned with the impact of subpar sleep on the quality of my life, which to me honestly is terrible. Days and days of mindless existence, eyes burning, waiting for the next night to hopefully bring some relief, but each one ends the same as the last. I feel like an 80-year old trapped in the mind of a 30-year old.I want to sleep better in order to live better! At the very least, I want to get back to the way I was. I think I would rather suffer through 2-3 completely sleepless nights per week in return for 4-5 solid, good nights that make the next day possible to enjoy.
Carls, I think that when people say what they say, they mean you would die if you didn’t sleep for a minute, which isn’t the case with you, I think. For instance, do you at least occassionally get relief from those no sleep days?
The only people who die from no sleep, as you know, are those poor FFI souls, and they do so due to a clear cause. Don’t get me wrong, reading about them (something neither of us should do but we all end up doing) gets me worried, too. I mean, my sleep seems to be getting shorter and shorter, how far will it go? But the thing is, that disease is genetic, it’s rare, and if somebody in our familylies had it we would probably know.
In conclusion (I really don’t know when to shut up and stop writing), everyone has their own cross to bear, this one is ours. Luck of the draw, I guess. My goal right now is to find out why I’m this fatigued when everyone says I shouldn’t really be, and then to see if there is anything I can do about it
