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Remembering back to my wife dealing with this, just be aware that PND will hurt sleep too, and if you have that, then best to seek treatment. Maybe discuss with your midwife.
Hi Gill. I would just like to reinforce what Steve said. Stick with it and things will get better. Getting enough sleep again is such a good feeling.
Hi. I think you have come to the right place. I have found Martin’s stuff incredibly helpful. Do the two week course for starters (be patient), and take things from there. Depending on what your issues are, there is a lot of things to work with.
Short answer is yes. If I am in bed for while, then I start feeling pressure points and if I ask the dread question “what is comfortable position for my arms”, then discomfort wins. Getting out of bed to an armchair, wrapping in blanket and reading a few chapters of non-fiction in low light acts as reset – for the discomfort anyway.
At first, getting in and out of bed several times at start of night seemed well, lame, but things did improve quickly. Just as well my wife sleeps deeply.
Long answer is more complicated. I still have some nights where early sleep is very poor. I have got past worrying that I wont get to sleep, but it seems that I do sometimes enter a state between wake and sleep that doesnt feel like sleep. I must actually be sleeping because I realize I have been dreaming (though it seemed real) and time passes too fast. I seldom get up when this is happening. Typically I need a trip to loo after a few hours and when I came back, I go straight to proper restful sleep.
I used to read in bed before settling down to sleep but now I read in a chair. That means I am not feeling any pressure points from already being in bed before settling to sleep. You dont want to being the night by tossing and turning. I think the “pressure point” stuff is largely a perception issue rather than a “you need a new bed”. I wake from sleep perfectly comfortable and relaxed.
ouch. I have BPH and up 2-4 time a night but extremely reluctant to get surgery. However, unless it is close to morning, I usually go back to sleep more or less instantly – provided I got to sleep in the first place. My first thought is work on not engaging arousal system by worrying about not getting back to sleep. Second thought would be try to wake up as little as possible on way. Maybe some mindfulness stuff might help but I would be interested to know what Martin thinks.
hypno-jerks were my problem too. If I jerked awake then I was giving myself the self-fulfilling message that i was in for bout of insomnia. I am slowly beating it. Last night I had two on way down but was still asleep in 30 min and got close to 8hours. I’d stick with Martin and work through CBT-I
Well persist with martin’s course and use it to work out what is keeping you awake. If you are like me, worrying about getting to sleep and over-attention to sleep would look to be issue. Martin has a great set of strategies to create a new relationship with your bed. Night shifts are tough though. Stick with it.
dahlia – welcome to the club. I am finding martin’s free course to be very informative and at business end of it there are strategies to try. I am doing better now that I understand that my particular issue is around triggering the arousal system by panicking about not getting to sleep. I am working on changing responses and building some positive attitudes to going to bed. I still spent hours last night in odd zone between awake and asleep which wasnt restful but I didnt bring myself into worried wakefulness either and slept soundly after a bathroom stop at 2am.
Hopefully Martin’s resources will help you understand what your issues are and then you can look for strategies to help.
A word on CBT. As scientist, I am predisposed to skepticism and CBT sounded pretty suspect on first hearing. However, I had close colleague on point of medical resignation with reactive arthiritis who did 3 day intensive CBT-based therapy in desperation. Came back a changed man and has been free of issues for years now. I dug more deeply into it after that. My daughter unfortunately developed RA and needed some help with chronic pain. She also did intensive CBT with my wife going along as a support person. It helps her manage pain but as side effect she got rid of irritable bowel ( a problem she had for years) practically overnight. Got to be worth trying. Thanks to my wife’s participation, I have a bit of a head start in knowing what to do. If I cant beat insomnia by myself, I will certainly get some proper CBT therapy.
I think I am making progress. I am doing every else as well – reading in an arm chair, getting up when not falling asleep etc. Because insomnia this comes and goes, I am cautious about attributing good sleep to progress. However, I have definitely had a couple of nights where was doing the “almost asleep, suddenly awake” and got to sleep by regarding it as good sign instead of panicking. Early sleep still seems very light. I have had one night when thought I hadnt been sleeping, then glanced at clock and discovered that oh yes I had been!
Working with my wife to suppress negative, arousal-promoting attitudes to sleep. She re-phrases any sleep worry I mention into a positive (with sub-text of “you are doing this wrong”!) Also working to create better associations between bedtime and sleep.
From teenage years I have had some fascination with hypogogic imagery and I think I became good at “noticing” and worse still coming awake enough to commit to memory. Now I am wondering whether this noticing is making that transition harder but I havent really had insomnia issues till I hit my 50s and only become a real problem recently.
Anyway, I am finding the emails great and I will be interested to see how the sleep diary looks after a week or so.
