[janiceannmckeachern]

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Validating that things are difficult for me right now helped me to feel not so alone.

“You understand that trying to control or chase after sleep isn’t a workable strategy. What are you doing — or what do you need to do — to put that understanding into practice?”

I don’t know. That is my achilles heel. I interpret this as- I’m supposed to pretend that getting a few hours a night is not important to me. A few hours for me would be a miracle. I frequently pull 2 all nighters in a row so just 4 hours would be life changing. Getting out of bed when during nighttime wakefulness feels painful. Staying in bed during nightime wakefulness feels painful. I guess I have an extremely hard time accepting difficult thoughts and feelings.

I do my toward moves everyday and list 3 good things (I often find more than 3), keeping appointments, seeing friends, light exercise.
But it’s hard to enjoy any of it, I’m just going through the motions. I try to at least be in the moment while I’m doing the toward moves, and give myself a pat on the back for doing them and I do believe that helps.
Doing the AWAKE exercise at night feels like a sleep effort and I’m trying to trick my brain into not being in fight or flight.
The NOW exercise is a little more effective for me and I practice that throughout the day.

I think it’s just going to take longer than I think it should. This is going on a 6 week relapse for me after 3 years of being in remission. Since I’ve been through this before, it seems like it shouldn’t be this hard or take this long to get back on track.

Thanks for reading.

[janiceannmckeachern]

I think I had an insight today. My sleep window is 12ish to 6 ish and I’ve been trying to practice the awake exercise, which has been hard for me. I can do up to the “experience” piece. I realized I have a hard time experiencing difficult feelings in general. I usually want to feel mostly good most of the time. I want to feel energized, mostly happy, and productive with my day. I think why insomnia is so hard is because it is so far away from my baseline of how I want to feel. Today I had the thought…I’m trying so hard to control my life experience, not just with sleep but a lot of other factors. My work, my partner, the future, finances. Sometimes I am just trying to control these things with my mind. Not even with behaviors. Like mentally wanting my work to be different but not doing anything to change it or wanting a certain thing out of the future but not taking action to plan for it. I’m seeing how much I try to control things that I can’t control. Not with actions but with my mind. Then my body reacts to the control attempts and that’s where stress, fear and anxiety step in. I took a step back and saw that my obsessing could be about many things: sleep, health, money, aging. I had a moment where I could see myself doing it and I thought wow that’s a lot of wasted energy worrying about the future. And tomorrow after a difficult night’s sleep is the future. I’ll doubt I’ll sleep tonight but it’s progress no perfection.

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