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It sounds like you have a desire to sleep at 9:30 PM — and your experience tells you that you cannot make yourself fall asleep at 9:30 PM through effort.
You can, however, control what time you go to bed and what time you get out of bed in the morning.
Is going to bed at 9:30 PM something that creates good conditions for sleep and doesn’t create a struggle? If so, you might want to stick with it! If not, perhaps a change might be helpful (and change doesn’t need to be permanent).
Typically, people without insomnia go to bed when they are sleepy (or at a time when they usually feel sleepy) and get out of bed around a similar time each morning. And, everyone is different — so a blanket statement that people shouldn’t go to bed “too early” is unlikely to be helpful for everyone!
What guidance does your experience offer you and what did you pick up from Week 1 of the course to help you with this?
—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.
My thoughts are that sleep cannot be controlled (if it could be, insomnia wouldn’t exist). We can set the stage for sleep but we cannot make a certain amount or type of sleep happen.
As you suggested, any treatment or any “thing”, if done with the intention of making a certain amount or type of sleep happen, can set the stage for struggle and backfire.
—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 not always easy to accept our thoughts (especially the really difficult ones), so you aren’t alone in finding that hard. How much easier is it to adopt a strategy of resistance and fighting them?
If you’d have used an AC at night before sleep was an issue or a concern, then using an AC now doesn’t sound like a sleep effort — but you are the expert on you!
—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, Hidai. You’ve learned that after nights of less sleep, sleep becomes more likely on subsequent nights (our brain can often try to tell us the opposite)!
How did you respond to those nights of poor 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 — you are taking action and learning from your actions. That’s what counts! And, it often takes some time to adjust to a new sleep window.
How do you know what time it is when you wake during the 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.
Chronic insomnia is typically described as experiencing insomnia symptoms (such as difficulty falling asleep, difficulty falling back to sleep) at least three nights each week for at least three months.
A key part of the insomnia struggle is how we respond to being awake when we want to be asleep and how we respond when our mind generates thoughts and feelings we’d rather not experience. Typically, the more we resist, the more we struggle.
Is there anything useful here?
—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 that you’re now able to recognize the difference between insomnia (not getting the sleep you want) and sleep deprivation (not giving sleep the opportunity to happen).
How did you decide when to go to bed before sleep was a struggle? What information did you take from the Week 1 videos about creating a sleep window that might help you decide on an earliest bedtime?
—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 sharing!
You know that you CAN sleep! You’ve learned from your experience. You’ve shifted away from a focus on actions intended to make sleep happen (something that created more difficulty and struggle) and toward actions that better reflect your values — who you are, who you want to be, and the life you want to live.
As you take this approach, you are starving insomnia of the oxygen it needs to survive. It is losing its power and influence over you. With less struggle comes more peace.
You are noticing change happening because you are making change happen! I wish you all the best as you continue to move forward!
—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 🙂
Your eye issues sound very difficult. I am glad to hear that your eyes are OK, although they are still strained by fatigue. It makes complete sense this makes it harder for you to go about your days normally.
You are the expert on you. If you feel you need to limit certain activities, then you need to limit certain activities. What are the alternative activities you can engage in when you are unable to go about your day as normal — activities that reflect your values; who you are and who you want to be?
It also makes complete sense that you are finding it hard to be OK with not sleeping when you anticipate the obstacles that come with it and the pain that might show up. What makes you feel you need to be OK with all that stuff?
Your superpowers of self-awareness and self-reflection have helped you identify that, for you, ACT is a better approach to all this difficult stuff versus CBT.
You are practicing building skill in experiencing wakefulness with less struggle and making space for difficult thoughts and feelings (like anxiety) to exist and to come and go with less struggle. You know that the struggle only makes things more difficult.
It sounds like you learned something from taking trazodone. You also mentioned that taking it was a mistake — what made that action a mistake?
—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.
Your awareness of the presence of anxiety and how it can so easily pull you into a struggle meant you were able to respond in a workable way, @louismerlin!
Instead of trying to control what you know from experience cannot be controlled, you accepted the presence of that anxiety. You didn’t get drawn into a battle and a struggle with it — something that is so easy to do and only gives it more power and influence and creates more difficulty.
You are clearly making progress thanks to your superpowers of commitment, self-awareness, and curiosity!
—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.
Ups and downs are part of any journey.
It sounds as though you are measuring progress based on how you sleep from night to night. If your experience tells you that sleep is out of your direct control, might that be setting you up for some ongoing struggle? If so, what might some other ways of measuring progress be, do you think?
As for shortening the sleep window — that’s up to you. A sleep window cannot make a certain amount or type of sleep happen; it’s more a tool that is intended to help you move away from chasing after sleep (the more you chase after sleep the more elusive it becomes, right?).
How do you respond when you are awake during your sleep window and what are you learning from 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.
Waking during the night is a normal part of sleep — and, quite often, those awakenings become more difficult the more we try to fight or avoid them.
There is no such thing as being so tired that you will not sleep. Sleep pressure builds with every minute of wakefulness.
What can often make sleep more difficult (and kick our problem-solving brains into overdrive) are all our attempts to make sleep happen and all our attempts to control what we might be thinking or feeling.
It sounds as though your experience tells you that being in bed, tossing and turning, struggling, and obsessing over sleep isn’t helpful. Perhaps an alternative might involve doing something more pleasant in bed (or out of bed if you prefer). If nothing else, you’ll be spending the time awake in a more useful way and you might also help train your brain that your bedroom isn’t a battleground.
We’ll be exploring all these issues in more detail as you continue to work 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.
Hello @Lizag 🙂
Those jerks can be very frustrating and annoying. What guidance does your experience have to offer when you reflect on your ability to directly and permanently calm your nervous system through effort?
It’s great to hear that you are working on the self-talk — being hard on ourselves is so easy and it’s rarely helpful. How are you going to change the way you talk to yourself?
—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, Becc! Your superpower of self-reflection helped you realize that although those feelings are difficult and unpleasant, they aren’t harmful — and that battling with them only gives them more power and influence and makes them more difficult.
As you practice making space for them to exist they are better able to come and go — and, without the addition of struggle, they can soften a little and become less powerful.
Reducing resistance can also require less energy and attention, making it easier for you to do more of what matters each day.
—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.
Waking during the night is a normal part of sleep.
(Although it can also be a symptom of other issues such as sleep apnea, that will usually comes with additional symptoms such as daytime sleepiness, pauses in breathing, very loud snoring, and/or waking with a headache and/or a dry mouth or sore throat.)
Other than taking a PM medication when you wake, how else are you responding to those awakenings and what are you learning from how you are responding?
—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.
