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That’s not unusual at all — and I would probably be more surprised if you didn’t experience any sleep disruption when a big life event approaches! You are a human being after all!
Remember, too, that sleep restriction isn’t intended to make sleep happen because sleep cannot be controlled. The goal is to help you move away from chasing after sleep by going to bed earlier, staying in bed later, and trying to nap during the day — all actions that can make sleep more difficult.
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
I wonder if trying to control what you think and feel might actually require more energy compared to giving your thoughts and feelings permission to come and go as they please?
Everything here is an experiment! Thanks for sharing your willingness to explore a different approach!
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
I think that any time we are engaged in an effort to control our thoughts and feelings, we might be setting ourselves up for a struggle — unless you have found from experience that doing things like breathing exercises permanently eliminates difficult thoughts and feelings?
Perhaps it might be more useful to use the energy and attention that might be used in an attempt to control your mind to do things that are aligned with your values and that keep you moving toward the kind of life you want to live instead — even when difficult thoughts and feelings are present? Do you think that might be a more workable approach?
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
It’s totally understandable that feeling as though you aren’t making much progress would make you feel sad, Milko.
Unfortunately, we cannot control progress — just as we can’t control sleep, and just as we can’t control what goes on inside our minds. For as long as we try, we’re likely to find ourselves tangled up in a struggle and it’ll be harder to make progress.
What we can control are our actions. We can always practice. We can always implement.
So, what we can do is continue to practice a more workable way of responding to this difficult stuff — we can practice moving away from trying to control what cannot be controlled, we can practice moving away from trying to make sleep happen, we can practice moving away from trying to fight or avoid the thoughts and feelings that can come with nighttime wakefulness, and we can practice doing things that are important to us (while being kind to ourselves) even in the presence of all this difficult stuff.
Perhaps the only thing “missing” here is full acceptance that sleep (and all the thoughts and feelings that often come with insomnia) cannot be controlled, Milko? For as long as you might try to eliminate nights without sleep, you might find yourself struggling with them.
We’ll continue to explore this further, as the course progresses.
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
Since you have enrolled in the course, I’ve moved your post from the public forum to the client forum.
As you will discover as you continue to work through the course, the focus here isn’t on CBT-I since, in my experience, that can sometimes lead to more effort to make sleep happen and we can end up getting tangled up in our thoughts and feelings, trying to challenge them, evaluate them, and change them. All of this can make things more difficult.
What we’re looking to do here is to move away from the struggle — because that’s really what insomnia is.
Struggle.
We (completely understandably!) struggle with wakefulness as we try to get rid of it when it shows up and make sleep happen and we can struggle with all the thoughts and feelings that can come with insomnia, trying to fight or avoid them.
All our focus and attention can end up on efforts, rituals, and ongoing detective work to make sleep happen and this can make it harder for us to live the kind of life we want to live.
Since we can’t control sleep or what goes on in our minds, all our efforts and struggle can make things more difficult by consuming our energy and distracting us from doing things that matter to us.
So, the goal with this course is to explore ways of moving away from all the effort and all the struggle. To respond to all this difficult stuff in a more workable way so it perhaps becomes less of an influence and plays less of a role in our lives.
As a bonus, the less engaged we are in a battle with sleep (and perhaps our minds, too!) the better conditions for sleep become.
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
Yes — definitely not alone! 🙂
Do you think it might be useful to practice becoming more aware of the good stuff that might get missed when conflict and difficult thoughts and feelings show up? If so, how might you do that?
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
Wonderful — thanks for sharing! Do you have an action plan in place yet for changing your approach so you can achieve your goal of nipping this in the bud?
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
No need to shake the anxiety but it can be useful to practice moving away from trying to fight or avoid it. As for monitoring, not much we can do to stop that from happening (I’m going to guess you know this from experience!) — so it might be useful to practice allowing the monitoring to happen whenever your brain chooses to monitor, too.
With this approach, all the stuff your mind decides to do will still happen (even if you wish it didn’t!) but the difference now is that you aren’t adding all the struggle on top!
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
Why do you think sleep seems to be a problem at the current time? How are you currently responding when you find it hard to fall asleep or hard to fall back to sleep?
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
Thanks for sharing, Fletch! Did you make any changes after going through the email course that you found helpful, or was it a general shift in your mindset? How has the role/influence of anxiety changed when it comes to your sleep?
In this episode of the Insomnia Coach podcast, Gretchen associated the worsening of her insomnia to the onset of menopause:
I hope this is useful!
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
Thank you so much for taking the time to share — you experienced a change because of your curiosity, willingness, and commitment to make changes that are rarely easy to make!
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
Thanks for sharing! What do you feel were the most important/helpful things you picked up while you were working through the course?
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
Have you tried simply observing your breathing and heart rate during the night without any judgement or attempts to control those things? You might think of yourself as a curious scientist simply observing and watching with interest, for as long as your mind finds them interesting.
Quite often, when we try to control our minds, we get tangled up in a struggle — because our minds will do what our minds choose to do!
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
Welcome to the forum! How might you gain freedom from insomnia, do you think? I wonder if doing things that matter — even when insomnia is present — might be a helpful way to get started?
After all, if you do things that help you live the kind of life you want to live, even when insomnia is present, it can’t hold you as its prisoner, right?
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
Thank you for your kind words and for sharing that big insight!
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
