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I totally understand. It’s a year and a half now. I don’t know how I am still alive and sane.
I find that if I stay in bed long enough I can get an hour here or there that I would not have had otherwise. Every little bit helps.
And it hurts physically to get out of bed when I am exhausted and looking at the next 19 hours of being awake. The idea of being conscious that long is very intimidating.
Please, please help me figure out how to get through the sleep restriction nights. It is brutal.
This is great encouragement and thank you. I am having a huge amount of trouble with the sleep restriction — it is so painful. Do you have ideas how to make yourself do it, ease into it, carry it through when you are so exhausted?
Right, I dread bedtimes. I am working on not going to the bed at night if I am anxious, since it won’t help me. Something that does help is reading black website pages with my Blue Blocking Glasses on. Then I can just move the laptop to one side and drift off. This seems to be the best thing I’ve been doing since this insomnia started last year.
Yeah, it’s very frustrating to pop in and out of bed all night, and it really isn’t helping. Getting up wakes me more than if I just like there comfortably.
I wake up in the middle of the night, always. And if I have had one or two hours of sleep, my mind and body seem to think I am done, and I can’t get sleep back. I try really hard to think about neutral things when i lie there, but some nights it is harder than others.
I know it’s a learned skill to relax the mind. I try to remind myself that nighttime is the time to think about relaxing things, not what i have to do, or my sadness, or my anxiety. Sometimes this works.
Yeah, this program is very tough. I wish I could have faith that it works, instead of trying yet another system that might fail. It’s almost like we should take a life break for the 8 weeks and only focus on the program…not have travel or late night events?
Thank you. So this is the part about conditioning yourself to associate the bed with sleep, it seems:
“Many insomniacs see their bed as an enemy and a place to fear. They see their beds as a place of wakefulness rather than sleep. Stimulus control corrects this by reducing the amount of time spent awake in bed and making sure that the bed is used only for sleep”
And it takes about two weeks for this to kick in? That is a LOT of yo-yo nights. Man. That’s pretty painful for those two weeks, esp if it doesn’t in fact help. I am not really sure what the sleep pressure is…does it start from scratch after each night where one has actually slept?
Kenny, if there is a drug that actually helps you, using it (maybe tapering it w your dr) doesn’t sound as bad as no sleep at all.
Nothing outside of actual sleeping pills helps me. I still have hope that this site and Martin can help me. I’m running out of ideas, and my Dr gave up on me already (he told me just that).
Oh. It isn’t intended to help with sleep that night….that’s good to know. BC it seems to make me have less sleep overall, since nights like that shot, and I get at most 1-3 hours of sleep in, or none, on those nights.
How many nights of bad sleep and restricted time should one endure before it starts helping?
Gabapentin used to help give me a couple or three hours of sleep if I took it once a week, but even thst seems to have stopped working. I might need to increase the dose and again, just try once a week.
I try to mix up supplements and meds, but only benzos or ambien really help, and only for 2-3 hours, and I have to go to Mexico to get it.
Pot helps a little bit, it might give me an hour or so of sleep – I wish something would help, or that drs would prescribe the things that actually help.
Trazedone makes my heart beat like a heart attack or something, so that’s not really helpful. I am getting to the point after a year of insomnia that I will chance a heart attack if I could just get good sleep!
