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Hello Anu and welcome to the forum! I would suggest discussing concerns about headaches with your doctor. I don’t know of any evidence that chronic insomnia causes headaches (or that getting four to five hours of sleep leads to more headaches) but stress/anxiety is definitely associated with tension headaches. Office environments also seem to increase the problem of headaches associated with anxiety (possibly due to all the artificial light and perhaps being more sedentary).
—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.
Some good stuff in this discussion! All I would add is it might be worth exploring the thoughts that seem to generate the anxiety you described since the thoughts we have that generate anxiety are rarely as accurate as they first seem.
If you don’t fall asleep right away and you feel your heart racing, what is going through your mind? What is it about the idea of not being able to fall asleep that seems to generate that anxiety?
—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, Panos!
If you could answer some additional questions, perhaps we can explore these issues further!
Are you still following any kind of sleep window? If so, what time does it start and what time does it end?
When you wake before your alarm, why do you think you find it hard to fall back to sleep?
Why do you think you feel anxious about sleep or wakefulness? When you start to worry about sleep, what is going through your mind? What is it about the idea of getting four to five hours (or less) of sleep that seems to generate anxiety?
—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 sounds as though things are improving this week and that you have found the DARE approach to anxiety helpful! It also sounds as though you are finding that new sleep window to be helpful!
I wonder if those breathing and mindfulness exercises you mentioned in an earlier post had become covert sleep efforts? The only goal with any relaxation technique is relaxation — no relaxation technique can generate sleep (the only thing that can generate sleep is being awake for long enough).
Any time we engage in a sleep effort, we make sleep more difficult because sleep cannot be controlled. Trying to control sleep increases arousal and the body then needs to generate more sleep drive (spend more time awake) to overcome that heightened arousal.
I am so glad you didn’t give up and that you are continuing to move forward, Lauren!
—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.
Glad to hear you are doing better, Michelle — thank you for sharing!
—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 Ben and welcome to the forum.
Health challenges are common triggers of sleep disruption — and that makes sense because sleep is sensitive to our overall level of well-being. If we are worried about something, stressed about something, or if there is any sudden change (or upcoming change) to our life, sleep will always be affected. That’s just a normal part of sleep, and life.
Usually, sleep recovers as soon as the initial trigger is no longer relevant, or we have adapted to whatever that initial trigger was. If it doesn’t, that’s usually because the way we think about sleep changes and because we might have implemented new behaviors in a bid to improve our sleep (such as spending more time in bed, modifying our days, spending time researching sleep, canceling plans, experimenting with teas, supplements, and pills, etc).
That’s because these new sleep-related thoughts and behaviors can perpetuate sleep disruption because they can weaken sleep drive, disrupt the body clock, and increase arousal.
Since your sleep has become disrupted relatively recently and due to what seems to be an obvious cause, the best reaction may be no reaction — in other words, if you can continue to go about your day as though you are sleeping just fine and if you can avoid the temptation to start spending more time in bed or to put effort into sleep, you give your sleep the best chance possible to get right back on track all by itself.
I hope this helps.
—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 again, Phsu! You might find it helpful to explore the thoughts that seem to be generating anxiety — when you have a difficult night, what is going through your mind? What is it about the idea of being awake during the night that seems to generate a lot of worry and concern?
—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 — it’s great to hear that you are becoming familiar with cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) techniques and that you have started to implement sleep restriction to help build sleep drive and reduce the amount of time available for nighttime wakefulness!
As you mentioned, it can definitely be more difficult to be a mom to a three-year-old when living with insomnia! However, you have evidence that this is something you are still able to do!
On a related note, I am really encouraged to know that you are keeping about your day and continuing to engage in activities that improve the quality of your day and improve your quality of life!
So often, the temptation can be to eliminate daytime activities from our life because we feel we simply can’t do them or because we worry that they might affect our sleep. The end result is that we remove enjoyable things from our life, end up being more sedentary, spend more time thinking/worrying about sleep, put more pressure on ourselves to sleep, and virtually guarantee that difficult nights generate unpleasant days. This only serves to perpetuate insomnia.
Nobody needs to live with chronic insomnia for the rest of their lives — a quick browse of the Insomnia Coach® Podcast is proof of that!
I am encouraged to read that you are currently averaging five hours of sleep each night — that’s better than averaging four hours, three hours, two hours, or one hour — and means you are close to what you feel your ideal sleep requirement is.
You might want to try a sleep window a little longer than five-and-a-half hours if you feel that you are averaging five or more hours per night. A sleep window of closer to six hours might make you feel a bit more comfortable.
Remember that we have no control over sleep duration — as soon as we try to get a certain amount of sleep or try to fall back to sleep when we wake during the night, we increase arousal and make sleep more difficult. All we want to do is make sure we are creating good conditions for sleep — and implementing a consistent and appropriate sleep window is a great first step!
I hope this helps.
—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.
Great question! The accuracy of your average nightly sleep duration isn’t critical — your best guess is just fine, especially when you get started implementing a sleep window since you can make adjustments to your sleep window each week or two, based on how much time you feel you’re spending awake at night.
—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 interesting that you didn’t go to work because you felt there was a 50% chance of you passing out or fainting (even though it doesn’t sound as though that has ever happened before — and it didn’t happen when you stayed at home) and that staying at home seemed to lead to a day filled with unpleasant sleep-related thinking that might not have occurred had you gone to work and been focussed on something other than sleep.
I wonder if this experience might prove to be useful next time you worry about sleep or think about staying home from work after a difficult night?
—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 again Tatyana! If you are keen to explore this further, you might want to consider these questions:
If you had gone in to work after zero hours of sleep, how likely do you think it would have been that you would have passed out or fainted? Would that have been 100% certain? 50% certain? 10% certain? What likelihood would you give it, as a percentage?
When you stayed at home instead of going to work, did you pass out or faint at home? What happened during the day you spent at home after zero hours of sleep that has you so worried about it happening again?
—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.
Congratulations on your decision to start implementing cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) techniques such as sleep restriction!
It sounds as though you experienced some improvements in your sleep very quickly — within the first couple of weeks, you found that the time it took for you to fall asleep stabilized and even got shorter, although there were some nights when it took a while to fall asleep (and this might be due to the length of your sleep window).
It can be helpful to recognize that you are on a journey and that it is completely normal to experience ups and downs along the way. Just as a ship sailing around the world will encounter storms and rough seas, it will pass through those storms as long as it continues on its journey.
If you continue to move forward, if you continue to implement techniques that build sleep drive, strengthen the body clock, and lower arousal, you will get through this storm and you will continue to make progress. As Jay suggested, consistency is key!
Your insomnia is testing you, Phsu. Will you let it win?
—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.
This is a great question — so thank you for your post, David!
First of all, I’d suggest not checking the time when you wake during the night since that can increase arousal and make falling back to sleep more difficult.
Secondly, I think that if being in bed feels good — you feel comfortable and relaxed — then it’s OK to remain in bed. If being in bed doesn’t feel good, then you might want to get out of bed and do something a bit more appealing until conditions feel right for sleep.
Since I don’t suggest checking the time during the night, I think it’s usually worth giving yourself the opportunity to fall back to sleep if you wake during your sleep window. Unless you are convinced the alarm is about to go off and you are convinced that conditions just won’t feel ever feel right for sleep, then I’d suggest following the routine outlined above rather than getting out of bed and starting your day.
With this being said, you are the expert on you! I hope this helps!
—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.
As suggested by Chee, a good starting point might be making sure you aren’t allotting too much time for sleep since that can lead to us going to bed before we are sleepy enough for sleep (this means it will take longer to fall asleep) and it can generate more nighttime wakefulness. This sleep disruption can then, in turn, lead to more thinking and worrying about sleep and that can perpetuate our sleep difficulties.
You might find the sleep restriction resource page a good place to start — if you have any specific questions, please let us know!
—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.
As suggested by Chee, waking during the night is a normal part of sleep! As the night progresses, we might naturally find it takes a bit longer to fall back to sleep when we wake since so much of our sleep pressure has been relieved by the sleep we got up to that point. If we worry about the awakening that can make falling back to sleep really difficult!
It sounds like you are on the right track and just need to continue to progress through the ups and downs you are going to face on your journey toward a life of better 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.
