Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
I just like seeing different peoples progress and approaches , etc.
Bad mentality for you to have though, saying you will never get better.
My thing is Steve, I do think it’s possible to get better one day, but not without a constant maintenance in some way shape or form of SRT
STeve can you give a quick summary of what the last 2 months has been like for you leading up to this last week?
Well Steve I’ve finally reached the end of what’s been the worst week for me in a long while. All 5 days, none refreshed. Last night wasn’t horrible but it definitely wasn’t good I can tell you that. Still no super strong sleep drive, and again, I was too stubborn to stay up til lord knows what time until it came. Basically the lesson learned here and the lesson everyone can take from me, is don’t ever lie in more than a half an hour on the weekends. Sure they were an amazing two days where I felt amazing, but come the work week and me being forced to wake at my 6am alarm again it all went downhill. I messed up my cycle and I paid for it badly. If I didn’t have to wake until 8am for work every day I can almost guarantee I wouldn’t have insomnia anymore, but this job and this 6am wakeup call is really making it difficult to fully heal.
Just so very sick of coming into work with dark circles under my eyes and so very sick of relying on coffee to push me through the mornings. Not really sure where to turn other than never sleeping past 6:30am max on the weekends ever again. I mean what is it going to have to end up? I can never sleep in on weekends ever again?
Wish Martin would chime in with some two cents for me. Until next time steve… I think this will be my last post for a good few days at least. Not that I’m nearly as bad as I once was, but I don’t think I can get much lower right now.
Hey Steve. I think for you the good news is that you at least have some structure in place and like I’ve said many times before, as long as you stick with it, you’ll be much better in a couple of months time. I hear you about how saddening it is to go from such a good phase, whether it be a few days or a full week, to such a bad phase whether that be a few bad days or a full bad week. That is the case for me right now. This entire week has just been NOT good, and I’m starting to think both of those Saturday and Sunday lie in’s until 7:15am (way past my usual wakeup time) messed everything up. Boy those days were amazing and I felt so well rested, but when it came time for work Monday morning and my 6am alarm it didn’t work out. Had no real sleep drive the night before. This entire week has basically been a process of resetting it all. Last night was slightly better than the previous few, but I’m still tired today. Some form of SRT for life in order to have good sleep doesn’t sound appealing to me at all but that might be the direction I’m ultimately heading in.
Thought I’d do a positive post for the first time in a while noting my improvements from where I was 2.5 years ago to how far I’ve come since then, especially in the last 5 months. Maybe this will give me the boost I need to get back on track.
-no longer ever wake in the middle the night
-early awakenings are much more rarer
-always fall asleep within a half an hour
-sleep anxiety/fear is down tremendously from where it once was, even as recent as 4-5 months ago
-more good nights than bad overall in the last 5 months than when looking back at the 2 years beforehand
-though I’m still upset a lot and still wonder, I have a ridiculous understanding about sleep and insomnia in general more than ever before
-I have not taken anything extra to “help” me sleep in a long time (i.e. Sleepy time tea, ZZZquil, melatonin pills, etc)
Hope you’re joking about the “light glasses”, Steve. I don’t care what they say can help or can’t help, my thing is, if you have to start wearing special glasses as bedtime approaches, you’re only giving anxiety that much more of a chance to increase. I didn’t need special “glasses” for 32 years of my life to sleep. Now I do? No.
Thanks for your words though. I really appreciate your optimism for me. But at this point I’m almost completely immune to lines like “Hang in there” or “You’ll get back on track soon”. After 2.5+ years of this, you just have to respect that. What I do have are the tools to start sleeping better when I REALLY want to, yes, but the problem is just how long will I have to revert to them? Tonight for example, after 3 crummy nights previously, I have decided I will not enter my bedroom until I feel the sleep drive come on strong. Whether that’s at 12am or 12:30am, it doesn’t matter, I know its what I have to do. It might mean another tired day tomorrow, but at least it might help reset my sleep drive/cycle after whats been a pretty rough 3 days.
Well, another rough night. Just went face to face with my boss with a nice set of dark circles under my eyes. This all coming off of three of the most amazing nights in a row in last Thursday Friday and Saturday. I knew going into Sunday night as per usual it wasn’t going to be as easy heading back into the work week, but this has now carried over THREE nights in a row with no heavy sleep drive. I know some of you might get on me about not just staying up until the drive came, but when its 11:30pm and I’m still feeling pretty tired and I have to be up at 6am, sometimes I just literally cannot help getting into bed and taking my chances.
Sunday, Monday and Tuesday were all cases of this, with last night being the worst. I don’t know what it is or what happened. But again, 10:30, then 11pm, and no strong sleep drive came on. Finally around 11:30 I began feeling pretty tired, close to that unable to keep my eyes open point, but not the absolute exhausted head nodding sleep drive that always almost guarantees me a good night. I went in bed at 1130p, crashed around 12a, and woke at 5:45a. Of course as you all know, under 6 hours is pretty much a guaranteed zombie day for me.
I think something happened where I slept SO well those three nights in a row last week that it gave me that old weird anxious feeling of “well this can’t keep up now into the full work week, right?”. On top of that, I slept until 7:15am on Sunday which messed up my cycle and left me feeling pretty wide awake come Sunday night. I know this is a lot of rambling but I’m hoping you all followed. Having a rough day so far today. Just the usual case here with me. One step forward, two steps back, and zero sign of ever moving fully out of this.
While everyone is different, in my opinion its just going through the motions of it all. I’ve had good weeks, I’ve had bad weeks I’ve had good nights and I’ve had bad. While a bad week is no fun and rough no matter how you slice it, I feel like as long as you are making progress in the long term, you should be happy and know that you will only improve more. For example I think you can safely say you’re in a much better spot now than you were in January, am I right? I can say the same, even if that means I’m still anything but thrilled with my overall progress. With regards to SRT, there’s no excuse for laying in your bed and not going by the “rules”. You will only build back up your anxiety doing that. Trust me. 2.5+ years of experience has taught me that. You have to have such discipline on yourself in these early stages. Even if that means laying on your couch. What you want to do is avoid staying awake in the bed, Steve.
Delv… No I never had nights with NO sleep whatsoever. You are confusing me with someone else. Yes I know 6 hours is plenty for some, but for me that’s always been the iffy number. Me feeling bad today of course was a result of my sleep. There were no other possible contributing factors.
What made it a “semi bad” night was the fact that I got into bed not completely exhausted. This was a result of sleeping in on Sunday. Sometimes going to bed not completely exhausted doesn’t end up being a problem, but more times than not, it does. This is what I’ve been talking about a lot lately. How I’m worried that for the rest of my life I’ll have to depend on/revert to SRT is SOME form to maintain decent sleep.
Anyway, I’ve learned one thing through all of this and it’s that as long as I go to sleep when that sleep pressure is full force (head nodding/can’t keep eyes open), I have about a 90% chance of a good night. Last night I tossed and turned for a solid 25 minutes, and then as noted I had that early awakening around 5:20am. I fell back into that wishy wash/light kind of sleep until 6am. So overall you can’t even call it a true night of 6 hours of deep sleep. There was really no way out last night. I could have stayed up more and built up my sleep drive more (i.e. until 12am maybe) but ultimately this still comes back to having to maintain the sleep wakeup time no matter what and never sleeping in TOO much as I did Sat and then of course Sun. SRT still very much has to be a part of my life.
steve… no I’ve gotten past SC a while ago now. I guess that’s a positive. Then again I always fall asleep within 30 minutes anyway so I don’t really need to worry about Sc anyway. 95% of the time I only go to bed when my sleep drive/pressure comes on strong.
So last night I got around 6 hours of sleep with a quick early awakening thrown in there. Not a good thing for me. This is the problem many of us can have on Sundays and it’s what happened to me on many occasions. I have these two great nights Friday and Saturday, but that is only because I can sleep in a bit and not have to worry about a 6am alarm. For example I’ll admit I slept until 7:15ish on both weekend days.
So when 11pm came around last night and I wasn’t nodding off, I knew I was in a bit of trouble. A half hour later I went to bed when I was finally feeling tired but not completely exhausted like I should have felt. But I just wanted to get going and get into bed. Not a great mentality to have when it comes to all of this SRT type stuff. I ended up passing out probably around midnight. Woke briefly at 5:20, then fell back asleep until my 6am alarm. Because of this lousy night though, I know tonight I’ll almost definitely be having that strong sleep drive around 1030-11p and I’ll be able to reset. It’s not the end of the world I suppose. One semi bad night is a small price to pay if I can get 6 decent nights the rest of the week, but, point of the story is, even when it comes to weekends, you should probably keep the sleep in extensions to only a half hour max if you want a good chance of having a refreshed morning come Monday.
Mac
Hi Deb. I’m doing ok, thanks for asking. After my bad night last Weds and horrific zombie day Thursday I recovered with three beautiful nights on Thursday Friday and Saturday. Of course I always tend to do better on the weekends since I can sleep in just a tad more, but there was a time when even weekends were an issue for me as you might know.
I can say with certainty now at this point here some 5.5 months since I first got here and first began my journey to truly trying to recover, that I know how to sleep again. I know how to get back into a groove. I have the tools, I have the mentality, I have the extremely lowered anxiety, etc. The problem of course and the one final issue that I cannot seem to tackle is sticking with this long term. When will that time come where I can just lay in bed at 10:30pm semi tired and still have that great 7 hour night (if not more). It’s nice to know I’m nowhere near how bad I was back in January, but if this past Wednesday night into Thursday was any indication, I still might be a long way from home.
Thanks Daf. Appreciate all that. What did you do to begin to really turn things around? Just SRT?
Maybe it all is just in my mechanical makeup. I’m a pretty anxious person to begin with and always worried about good sleep even before this all began. Maybe this is just the way it is for me sadly.
Steve if you are never feeling flat out tired/head nodding/eyes drooping then you MUST wait until you do. Only then will you really begin this process the right way in my opinion. Believe me I went without feeling that way for a long time too. I think it was just my nervous system going haywire around bedtime and never allowing me to get that feeling again. That all changed when I came back from a Euro trip late last year and was jet lagged my first night back. I’ll never forget it. It was 9pm and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I thought to myself oh hey, I remember this feeling. After that my brain was trained to remember what that felt like and I began slowly but surely beginning the REAL journey to getting better. Obviously I still had many struggles until I finally caved and began SRT in January, but point is, its crucial to wait for that truly sleepy feeling. On nights when I have it, as I said the other day, it’s around a 90% chance I get a decent night of sleep. If I go to bed not completely shot, those odds seem to go way down. Add on some sugar before bed like last night, and well, here I am today, zombie city.
Steve, if you are at a point where you legitimately cannot keep your eyes open and are craving sleep like crazy, THAT is when you know you are tired and it’s ok to hit the hay. Right now it still seems like you’re in a bit of an “all over the place” kind of phase with your SRT. I was there too. That being said, I think you are making SOME progress which is good. It will take time, maybe longer than you would have hoped, but I do believe you will improve.
Thanks Steve. I hate to get all overly negative because I know that’s bad for you and bad for the forums in general, but when I’ve been telling myself “hopefully they’ll get less and less” every week of these last 5+ months and they still happen what seems like SO very easily, not to mention my 2.5+ years of on and off insomnia in general, well it’s all just sickening to me after a while. I’m an absolute zombie today. It’s tough to feel so amazing one day and maybe even get to a point of progress where I have even a week straight of good/decent nights, and then boom, not just an “off” night, but a flat out bad night, like I had last night. I know I might sound spoiled and that’s fine to think, but this isn’t my first week of SRT or trying to get better, you know? I can only say “keep going” for so long until I feel like I’m conditioned to get at least one horrible night a week no matter what.
Good night. Bad night. Good night. Bad night. Always something it seems to cause another bad night. Amazing how on and off and hot and cold this is even all this time later.
So Tuesday night for example I had a very good night. A solid 7 hours, maybe even a touch more. Coming off of many good nights in the last week plus I was staying more optimistic than ever before, especially since I can just sense myself coming out of this more and more. Meaning that ok, I still have bad nights here and there, but overall I know for a fact I’m having more good nights than ever before. But as many of you know on here, my tolerance for these flat out awful nights is getting less and less as all this time passes.
Last night after a great well rested day, I ended up having a glass of orange juice and a piece of chocolate around 10:15pm. Sugar city I know, but I thought to myself, could this little bit of sugar really destroy my sleep? Let’s see. I was doing better after all. Anyway, 10:30 became 10:45, 10:45became 11pm, and before I knew it I felt something was happening. There was no strong sleep drive. Finally around 11:20 I started feeling sleepy, but not completely exhausted. STILL, I thought to myself maybe this is the night. Maybe this is the night where I just go to my bed and have a good night regardless.
Well, today is a zombie day. Tossing and turning last night, light awakenings at lord knows what times, waking a bit too early in general, etc.
As Deb, Steve and others who have been following my story know, my frustration doesn’t lie in being upset with never getting better. Because I have gotten better. My frustration lies in basically having to monitor myself and do what feels like a second job in order to make sure I sleep ok. Is this really what my life is going to be like forever is the question. ALWAYS worrying about how late I use my laptop, or how late I have a little bit of sugar, or making SURE I don’t go to sleep unless absolutely head nodding exhausted? Only time will tell, but it continues to not look good, and it continues to get me more and more fed up.
