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I’ve read in sleep books that this often happens. It is because we associate our beds at home with sleeplessness, whereas a strange bed somewhere else doesn’t have that association.
I find it interesting that 45 or 60 more minutes of sleep is the difference between you feeling refreshed or not. It’s like I never understand when people in the US have difficulty with losing an hour of sleep a night once a year for Daylight Savings. Never bothered me, either before or with the insomnia.
Were you taking the Trazadone while traveling? What dosage and how much before bed? Didn’t do much for me at 50 mg an hour or so before bed.
I had three hours of sleep as usual last night, so I envy your six.
Jurian, I think you are onto something, to some extent. We all have busy, overactive “monkey minds,” so it would seem like almost anyone other than a Buddhist monk would have insomnia. My husband claims he isn’t thinking about anything in particular as he attempts to fall asleep. To me this is close to impossible. I’ve learned enough about meditation to understand that the mind can’t ever be completely cleared for much time. You concentrate on your breathing or focus on an object…and then another thought pops up. All you can do is acknowledge it, accept it without judgment, and focus on your breathing again.
For a while, when the insomnia got really bad, I was getting stressed out about going to bed and even attempting to sleep. All I could think about was another sleepless (or 2 hour) night. I eventually worked through this with more meditation and ACT from Guy Meadows’ book. I won’t say my mind is completely clear, but I can confine it to neutral thoughts that have nothing to do with sleep or anything traumatic.
What I’ve started to do is play a game called “Bubble Up.” I wait for images to come to the surface, acknowledge them without telling a story, just thinking “Hmmm, interesting” and wait for the next one to bubble up. I don’t try to force anything to come up or connect the dots. It’s interesting enough to not make waiting for sleep tedious, but not so stimulating that I stay awake trying to solve anything or tell a story. For example, I may visualize a pineapple. A few seconds later, a lion. And so on. I got the idea from Yoga Nidra, where you lie and do a body scan, then a rotation of consciousness where the person in the video says images and you picture it for a second and then move on.
A psychologist invented a sleep App called My Sleep Button that does this. He claims that the cognitive reshuffle can make you sleepy. Supposedly it feels like dreaming. I tried a free version of it and wasn’t too impressed—I was staying awake for long periods of time and after less than five minutes, the objects were repeated, so after hearing “hat” five times, I was getting bored and fuming about how I wasn’t sleepy. And I’d rather not be playing with electronics in bed. Info about it:
He suggests a Do It Yourself cognitive technique, but it’s trying to come up with words that start with a certain letter—that wouldn’t be sleep inducing for me any more than counting sheep—I’d try to stay up just to prove how far I could go and it would keep my mind too active (I know that it can be good to have paradoxical intention, that you tell yourself you want to stay up, but this doesn’t always work and still is looking at sleep as a stressor, just that this time you supposedly want to stay awake rather than desperately wanting to fall asleep, but it’s intellectually dishonest and inauthentic to me.
The psychologist/Sleep Button founder explains it as:
mySleepButton is based on a recent theory about how the human sleep onset control system.
“Here are the basic concepts and postulates.
- “Insomnolent mentation” is mentation that interferes with falling asleep.
- “Counter-insomnolent mentation” is mentation that interferes with insomnolent mentation (e.g., typical meditation and progress relaxation). That is what a lot of psychological techniques involve. But this is not always sufficient to push you over the edge into sleep!
- “Pro-somnolent mentation” is thinking in a manner that signals to your brain that it is time to fall asleep.
- Whereas waking consciousness is characterized by a tendency to maintain a coherent awareness, while falling asleep thinking becomes less constrained by coherence, and the brain often produces micro-dreams, a cognitive shuffle.
- Information-processing and experience that the brain tends uniquely to produce during sleep-onset is pro-somnolent. That means that the sleep onset control system contains a positive feedback loop.
If this is true, then other things being equal, if you can engage in mentation that is both counter-insomnolent and pro-somnolent, you are more likely to fall asleep. That is what mySleepButton is meant to facilitate:
- Super-somnolent mentation = Counter-insomnolent + pro-somnolent mentation.”
Sorry that this is so long, Jurian, but it’s just so exciting to “talk” to someone who thinks like I do and is intrigued by this concept.
Okay, John, I’ll bite—tell us more. I agree that meds are not a permanent solution. And there definitely is a psychological component. I still think there may be some biochemistry problems—not enough melatonin or adenosine, for example, or too much cortisol.
Frozen Sun, I know you have said you can’t get Guy Meadows book in your country. Perhaps listening to some of his videos would be helpful. Basically the book could be boiled down to just a few pages about acceptance and even welcoming thoughts and feelings, not fighting them and not trying to sleep. I like the ACT approach, but I can’t do it 100%, so what works for me is a combo of regular CBT and ACT.
April, I do understand that there is a psychological component to insomnia for sure. I feel that it’s mostly physiological in my case, but of course I have no proof of this. I convinced my doctor to run a cortisol test thinking that’s why I wasn’t experiencing sleepiness and it was completely normal. It’s probably as Martin has explained (at least as far as I understand that—correct me if I am wrong, Martin) that the sleepiness that should have built up over the last 24 hours is overshadowed by the hyperarousal (on the surface, I seem/feel calm, thanks to yoga and meditation daily, but I definitely still think anxious thoughts even if I don’t experience visceral anxiety, or at least don’t think I do).
But what I can’t understand is why your/my insomnia comes back after it seems like it’s gone. Why do you think it returned to you after 19 months? What did you suddenly do/feel/think differently? In my case, after trying ACT and CBT, I thought I was finally cured last week when I slept normally 6 days in a row—a record for the past eight months. But even after such a great week, it’s now again like it never happened and I’m back to square one. And I can’t understand what is different. I do admit I was still taking supplements like melatonin, hops, and glycine, as well as gabapentin (prescribed for sleep, but I discovered it helps with hot flashes and frequent nightime urination, so worth taking for a while longer at least)—but now with the same supplements, I still can’t fall asleep until 2 a.m. (I’ve always been sleepy by 11, all my 64 years).
So if it’s just psychological and the anxiety gets resolved to the point where I slept normally 6 days in a row and you slept 19 months, then why would insomnia return if there are no new stressors in your life?
Deb, I do agree that there is a psychological component to insomnia (it can be said that there is a psychological component to everything we experience), but don’t you think there can be a physiological component as well? I admit I was convinced that I had too much cortisol at night since I was never getting sleepy and a cortisol test showed that wasn’t the case. But what about older people making less melatonin? What about hormonal changes at menopause? Restless legs? Sleep apnea? Research is just starting about adenosine, the neurotransmitter that makes people sleepy—very possible that people have differing levels. And research has already shown that people with insomnia have 30% less GABA:
It does seem that a credible study showed that white blood cells increased, but it was with lab-induced sleep deprivation, not actually insomnia. I do understand that not every sleep deprived person actually has insomnia (some people deliberately don’t get to bed at a decent time since they would rather do other things)—-but it seems that every insomniac will eventually be sleep deprived, unless it’s “just” sleep misperception.
