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What happens when you try to teach your students, Judi?
—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.
If you feel comfortable with your current sleep schedule, there’s no need to change anything. If you feel that you might be setting yourself up for a lot of wakefulness with your current sleep schedule, perhaps it might be worth experimenting with a new approach and reducing the amount of time you allot for sleep so it is a bit more closely aligned to the amount of sleep you are currently generating?
A clock doesn’t know when we are sleepy — trying to make sleep happen before we are sleepy can create some struggle and difficulty. It’s great to hear that you have been experimenting with a different approach and seem to be finding it helpful!
—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.
Sooner or later, sleepiness always happens — our arousal system can do a good job at suppressing it, but it usually shows up once we’ve been awake without any sleep for a certain amount of time. Sleep cannot be suspended indefinitely!
If you know from experience that you usually fall asleep pretty quickly when you go to bed at a certain time, without sleepiness being present, then you might simply give yourself a set bedtime. If you know from experience that going to bed without a strong sense of sleepiness can set you up for a lot of struggle, it might be worth waiting until sleepiness happens — even if that means no (or very little) sleep in the short-term.
Ultimately, though, the sleep window isn’t intended to make sleep happen or to get rid of wakefulness. It’s one tool that can help move us away from chasing after sleep — it’s all our attempts to make sleep happen, to get rid of wakefulness, and to fight or avoid the difficult thoughts and feelings that often come with insomnia that are the true cause of our struggle.
—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.
Hello Shelf and welcome to the forum. It sounds as though you’re saying that medication hasn’t proven to be helpful over the past 33 years so perhaps that might be an area that doesn’t require any more ongoing research, attention, and effort!
Understandably, you also haven’t found sleep hygiene, keeping sleep diaries, relaxation techniques, or meditation useful either — and that makes sense since none of those things can make sleep happen (since sleep cannot be controlled).
What’s your current plan for 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.
What’s your goal with sleep restriction? If it is to make sleep happen or to get rid of wakefulness you might be getting tangled up in a bit of a struggle since sleep cannot be controlled. Really, the sleep window helps ensure good conditions for sleep and helps move us away from chasing after sleep (for example, by going to bed earlier in an attempt to make more sleep happen or staying in bed later in an attempt to make more sleep happen). That’s about it.
If you’ve had insomnia for over two years, it’s unlikely that the initial trigger is still the main issue — it’s perhaps more likely that your completely understandable response to the sleep disruption is what’s providing the insomnia with the oxygen it needs to survive.
Anxiety can definitely make things more difficult, but it’s still possible to sleep when anxiety is present. What can make sleep a lot more difficult is trying to fight or avoid anxiety — because that requires so much energy and attention. And, since we cannot control our minds, the struggle is endless.
Sometimes a more useful approach involves practicing making space for difficult thoughts and feelings such as anxiety — that way, you move away from struggle and free up some energy and attention for other things. And those other things might help you live the kind of life you want to live, independently of sleep.
I think it’s perfectly OK to stay in bed when awake during the night and to do anything you like in bed during the night — wakefulness isn’t the enemy here. All the effort and struggle is often the real problem.
—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.
Although we have started working together since you posted this, I just wanted to post my appreciation for you sharing how helpful you found it to have a clear plan in place!
A plan of action can help eliminate all the “mental gymnastics” that can take place when we need to brainstorm what to do each day/night. Entering “robot mode” can make things a lot simpler!
One final note on plans and goals — we probably want to ensure they are based on action (something we can control) rather than outcome (something we can work toward but cannot make happen)!
It can also be helpful to consider how workable our plan might be — are we trying to control what cannot be controlled (such as sleep, wakefulness, thoughts and feelings)? If so, we might be setting ourselves up for a struggle!
—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! Waking during the night is a normal part of sleep. When we pay more attention to sleep these awakenings often become a lot more noticeable and it can also be harder to fall back to sleep if we start trying to avoid them or start trying to make sleep happen.
If you are concerned about the number of times you wake at night and have been told that you snore really loudly or stop breathing during the night, wake during the night with a gasp, or wake in the morning with a dry mouth, you might want to get evaluated for sleep apnea.
If you didn’t wake so often during the night, what would you be doing differently with your life? In other words, what would you do if you didn’t wake at night that you are unable to do now?
—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.
Hello Sabrina and welcome to the forum! How are you getting on since you posted?
Did you find that working less and taking medication to control your mood solved the problems you described in your post?
—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.
Fear is really difficult, right? And yet no matter how scared we might be when in bed, we are actually completely safe, right?
So, what’s going on?
Perhaps your mind is recalling all the struggle that has taken place in bed in the past and so it fires up in preparation to protect you from what it considers to be the threat of nighttime wakefulness and even your bed itself. In other words, your mind is doing its job of looking out for you and trying to protect you — it’s just that it’s maybe trying a bit too hard!
Perhaps the ongoing avoidance of fear and anxiety makes the appearance of fear and anxiety feel completely intolerable — something that must always be avoided at all costs (even though those emotions cannot physically harm you).
So, perhaps a workable way forward might be to train your brain that the bed is actually a safe place. That it’s not a place for struggle. That fear and anxiety, although very unpleasant, isn’t a threat or a danger.
What are your thoughts on that, and how might you achieve this, do you think?
—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.
You can do both at the same time; you can have an earliest possible bedtime (and only go to bed when sleepy enough for sleep) and get out of bed at the same time each day — and you can do something more appealing whenever nighttime wakefulness feels really unpleasant.
—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.
Hello Najrul and welcome to the forum! What changes have you made since you found Insomnia Coach? Worrying about your work life and your future is something that many people will identify with — we can’t really control those kind of thoughts and feelings since they are human thoughts and feelings! Sometimes much of our struggle comes from trying to control what our mind does.
—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 would suggest discussing the results of your sleep study with your doctor. Nobody here is qualified to interpret the information you shared with us, unfortunately.
CBT-I doesn’t require ongoing sleep studies since CBT-I is intended to help with chronic insomnia, not sleep apnea.
—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 know that since you posted this we have started working together, Chris — but as a note for others who may read your post, I think it’s important to acknowledge that this is a really difficult situation to be in.
And it’s also not particularly unique or unusual; in your post you described all of the understandable efforts you have gone to in an attempt to fight wakefulness and control your thoughts and feelings — which makes sense since all of that stuff can be really difficult and unpleasant.
And yet, it might be all of those efforts and attempts that are causing or exacerbating so much of the struggle you described so well and that so many people reading your post will identify with.
There is always hope — for you and everyone else! Nobody is broken — we just get stuck from time to time.
—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.
Hello Andrew and welcome to the forum!
I think it’s probably going to be hard to be OK with getting two hours of sleep, right? What can be a more useful approach might be to practice accepting that you simply cannot make yourself get a certain amount of sleep — and that the more you try to do that, the more you might end up tangled up in a struggle that can end up making things even more difficult.
What’s your goal/intent when it comes to getting out of bed during the night? What are you trying to achieve by doing 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.
Hello Justin and welcome to the forum!
Q1: I don’t like it when I have a bad night, especially when it happens on days, I have been looking forward to for weeks and even months. Why is it fair for me to wait all this time for something that will be very fun, maybe a once-in-a-lifetime experience, to only have a bad night before it and be miserable the next day and not enjoy it? How can I say that I should just push through? I just want to enjoy my fun day before my insomnia ruined it.
It’s really difficult when that happens, isn’t it? And, when it happens you face a choice — you can decide to do what matters (even though it might be less pleasant) or you can decide not to do what matters. If you do the latter, will that make things better?
Q2: I heard research done, I am not sure if it is accurate or not, but it says if you lose just one hour of sleep it will take 4 days for that to recover. So, experts say that for every 1 hour of sleep you lose takes 4 days to recover. So, if I have no sleep for just one night, it will take me over a month to ‘recover’ from that single bad night. How can I not stress about that?
Yes, your mind will likely stress about something like that since it’s job is to look out for you! There’s no real science or evidence behind those claims, though. The body compensates for lost sleep all by itself — not only through sleep duration but through sleep architecture; spending more time in deep sleep after getting less sleep on previous nights, for example. None of this stuff can be controlled — and it’s when we try to do so that we get tangled up in a struggle.
Q3: If I have been sleeping really well for a while how can I not be stressed about getting one bad night? I can’t do any mediation because I hear that it is trying which you don’t want to try.
For as long as you are a human being, you will experience stressful and other difficult thoughts and feelings. There’s no such thing as a life without stress or difficult thoughts and feelings. We often end up struggling when we try to fight or avoid certain thoughts and feelings.
Q4: Does one or a couple of bad nights affect consciousness and awareness in feeling alive and happy? Just a thought.
That’s hard to say, since there’s no magic happiness switch in the brain that we can switch on or off. Some people win the lottery jackpot and experience depression. Other people are homeless or living in refugee camps and describe themselves as being happy. Instead of trying to pursue a certain way of feeling, perhaps something we have more control over is pursuing certain actions — doing things that matter to us and that keep us moving toward the kind of life we want to live, even in the presence of difficult thoughts and feelings and even when “happiness” isn’t present?
Lastly, Q5: Does a bad night of sleep affect your cognitive abilities throughout the day? Will it damage my brain? Can I still be able to learn complex information and retain/remember it even after little or no sleep?
There is no evidence that a bad night of sleep will damage the brain or prevent learning or memory recall.
—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.
