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Nice video: https://youtu.be/rJ2mkv5GJhc
Indeed nowadays distance shouldn’t be a problem. Still, the shortage of specialists is shocking for such a common problem. After 8 months and insisting a lot I was finally deferred to a sleep clinic (when I was already almost completely recovered), but I got a letter from them saying they were saturated and didn’t accept new patients. Good luck we have the Internet!
Hi Deb, good to read that you’re making progress and that you found a specialist, something quite impossible where I live. I don’t know about ACT but if it works for you hold on to it 🙂 I just listened to Martin’s podcast, intensive sleep retraining looks like another interesting thing to try. About SR yes, it’s quite hard, for some people it may be faster but as I explained before I only started to see a slight improvement after 6 weeks. But I’m sure it wasn’t SR alone, it was also essential that I moved my focus to sports and other things I like to do.
Good luck!
Hi Deb, thanks, and how are you doing? Yes I remember, I was following your story too, also wondering how you’re doing.
Borgesbi, I’m checking my SR log, until week 6 things were still really bad. Since week 7 I started only having 1 or 2 really bad nights per week, but I was still restricting to 5,5 hours. After that I was able to consistently increase 15 minutes per week keeping my sleep efficiency above 85% (although not much above that). So on week 14 I reached 7h and my sleep had been quite good for some weeks with only around one less good night per week (no really bad nights). After that I stopped with SR but kept the good habits and almost without realizing my sleep became even better during the following months. So you see, it’s a matter of trust, consistency and patience 🙂
It will improve, CBTi works 🙂 Be patient and focus on all the things you really want to do in life 🙂 Good luck!
Hi Natasha, glad that I can help!
Indeed you can’t take any action when you’re in that state, but if there is a pattern like you sleep well for around 4 hours and then spend many hours in very light sleep, you should limit your time in bed to something like 5 and a half hours and increase it slowly.
I didn’t experience those problems with the facial skin, but that time when I spent 3 days with zero sleep I suddenly got the terrible feeling that the facial skin was super tense, pulling up, and my lips felt asleep. That feeling lasted some months. I was afraid it would never go away, but luckily it did. I still have some problems, e.g., I can’t drive a car for more than 30 minutes, but I don’t know if they come from my illness or from the months of insomnia, anyway they are gradually disappearing. I’m quite surprised of how the brain can recover, I was very pessimistic back then but the ability of the human body to heal itself is just amazing.
Hi Natasha,
Thanks, I wish the same to everyone with this problem!
Yes, I had that a lot. I just found an email to Martin from December, I told him I spent a lot of time at the end of the night in stage 1 sleep, and in my sleep diary I counted 4 hours of stage 1 as one hour of sleep. He asked me how did I know it was stage 1 sleep. This was my answer:
I know it’s stage 1 because I have the feeling that I’m awake but there are three differences with being awake:
1. Time goes by fast.
2. I may have thoughts but I don’t control them, or I have no thoughts at all.
3. I have some dreams.Sometimes I believe I have been awake for hours but suddenly I remember that I was dreaming.
BTW This happened _every day_ when I was taking Zopiclone: I would be unconscious for 2 or 3 hours after taking Zopiclone, and the rest of the night was stage 1 as described above. If I didn’t take Zopiclone then the whole night was stage 1. Pills really mess up your brain.You should try to avoid spending too much time in that state. It’s better to have less but better quality sleep, and gradually the good sleep will become longer.
Good luck!
Yes it’s amazing how relative it is, when my insomnia started I was in panic after sleeping “only” 5 hours, now I would be so happy if I slept 5 hours 3 days in a row. Deb, I’m curious, what was your average for getting a 6 hour sleep window? Was 6 hours your average? Because if that’s the case I think you don’t have a problem at all and you should live your life and forget you ever knew the word ‘insomnia’ 🙂 Although the good habits you’re learning will always be useful.
I’m really sorry I can’t give you a solution, I know how much suffering this is. But here is a thought: imagine one day your mental disorder stops affecting your sleep. I think there is a good chance that insomnia persists, simply because of your thoughts, beliefs and feelings about sleep. So at least you should take care of the part that you _can_ control. I apply the same to myself, I don’t completely understand what caused my insomnia, but I’m ignoring that side of the problem and I’m trying to have faith in a method that worked for other people, and very very slowly it’s working and I’m improving. It can be the same for you! At least you don’t lose anything for trying. There are things in that book that may be difficult to apply in a very severe case, like the “go on with your life as if nothing is happening” stuff, but you can still take profit of a big part of the book (or Martin’s program, or whatever method that is proven to work for a lot of people).
Again, lots of strength and patience, I’m sure you can improve! 🙂
Hi Elena,
I recently read a book that I find very inspirational, maybe you can give it a try, it’s The Effortless Sleep Method by Sasha Stephens. There are some mechanisms in your brain that you aren’t aware of, but once you begin to understand you can slowly with a lot of patience begin to change them. Don’t stop seeing your doctor to control a possible schizophrenia bout, which may cause insomnia, but insomnia can persist long after the cause that produced it is gone and doctors can’t really help with it, we need to fix it ourselves.
Lots of strength and good luck!
Hi Elena,
I don’t know what caused the extreme insomnia I had those days, and I think you also can’t be sure what causes yours. There may be factors we don’t understand, or even doctors don’t understand, but one thing is sure: worrying and being afraid is enough by itself to keep the problem. You must look into yourself and find the way to stop being afraid of death. I can’t explain how I did it, it’s something almost spiritual. I’m not talking about convincing yourself that everything will be fine, but to truly accept whatever may happen. There are techniques out there on how to overcome fear, lately I read something like “recognize your fear, accept your fear, BE your fear”. That should annihilate fear with it’s opposite. But I’m no expert, I’m just beginning to learn about this stuff. You know yourself and maybe you can instinctively find your own solution like I did.
Good luck, my best wishes and also for you merry Christmas and happy new year!
Congrats Preeced, nice to read a success story 🙂 Daf, the effortless sleep method is a relaxed version of CBT-i, the main idea is recovering the belief that you can sleep because the loss of that belief is what keeps your insomnia. It makes little sense to summarize it because reading the book carefully (probably multiple times) is essential for the method to work. BTW one of the points in the book is to avoid forums and talking about insomnia, so I shouldn’t be here 😉 But I just finished the book today.
Hi Elena,
I’m really sorry you’re suffering so much. I’ve been there, I had the same feeling, and I’m still alive and recovering. It will be the same for you, only in your current state it’s impossible to imagine it. I know the pain and the feeling is real. In my case, after 3 days with no sleep and going to the emergency post because of the serious complains I had, I started taking zopiclone every other night by doctor’s recommendation. If you somehow can avoid taking pills please do it, you will save yourself a lot of trouble! Anyway in my case zopiclone allowed me to “sleep” around 3 hours. It’s not real sleep, but it was better than those horrendous nights I had before. The key thing is that now I know a night with no sleep is better than a night sleeping with zopiclone, as long as you can stay relaxed, which I couldn’t at that point. If you don’t sleep but you are relaxed all night, you begin to be in the right track. For me an important thing was to stop being afraid of death. I don’t know how that happened, but one day I was just ready to accept whatever could happen.
One day I decided to take half zopiclone every day instead of a whole one every other day. Surprisingly the effect was the same as taking a whole one! Later I reduced it to a quarter and the same happened (only one night it didn’t work). Finally I quit completely and I spent a couple of days not sleeping – but this time in a relaxed state! – and then I started sleeping on my own. In the beginning it was terrible sleep, only one or two hours and only dreaming, no deep sleep, but every day it was a little bit better until getting deep sleep for around 3 hours every night.
So, it takes a lot of patience and acceptance, but you can do it! Be strong, you will master it!
That’s so great, congratulations! I’m in a similar journey with another book, “the effortless sleep method”. Nothing I can say here can compare to reading the book, but it’s amazing how accurately it describes the psychology of insomnia and all the things I went through. The main idea of the book is that your loss of belief in your own ability to sleep is maintaining the problem, and it explains how to fix that. Last night I started to apply the method; I didn’t sleep like a baby but it was a good beginning.
Sweet dreams!
Similar problem here; what I do is listen to an audiobook. I do it before going to bed and I really begin falling asleep while listening, my head dropping, really difficult to stay awake. Then when I wake up in the middle of the night, I try to do the same but I’m not sleepy anymore. Eventually I give up and go back to bed to see what happens; most of the times I just stay awake, terribly tired but not sleepy. I’m not completely conscious but I think there’s some background anxiety in my head causing that. I guess going back to bed when I’m not sleepy is an error, probably it’s better to stay in the other room and try again the next night.
