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As you pointed out, after five hours of sleep, sleep pressure is diminished and this means that not only is sleep needed less but it can also be more difficult to fall back to sleep, especially if the arousal system is activated.
The arousal system is typically activated whenever we put pressure on ourselves to sleep, put effort into sleep, strive for sleep, or worry about sleep. When sleep drive is strong enough, it can overpower the arousal system. When sleep drive is low (for example after getting five hours of sleep), the arousal system can win and temporarily suppress sleep.
So, with all this in mind, we can see that your sleep drive system seems to be working as it should be — when it’s strong, at the start of the night, it’s able to overpower the arousal system and sleep occurs quite easily. When sleep drive is lower (after five hours of sleep) then the arousal system is back in charge and this can make falling back to sleep quite difficult.
It might make sense, then, to see what you might be able to do to weaken the arousal system in addition to building sleep drive through the implementation of a sleep window. This might be done, as suggested earlier, by doing things like:
* Not putting pressure on yourself to sleep
* Eliminating sleep efforts
* Not striving for sleep
* Exploring the sleep-related thoughts that seem to generated worry and anxietyIt can be helpful to remind yourself, too, that the techniques you described (such as getting out of bed when being in bed doesn’t feel good) are not intended to generate sleep — they are simply intended to create better conditions for sleep to happen (they do this by addressing the behaviors that typically perpetuate sleep disruption).
So, when you get out of bed during the night — for example — you are doing this simply to give yourself a more appealing alternative to remaining in bed when being in bed doesn’t feel good, and to prevent you from reinforcing a negative association between your bed and unpleasant wakefulness.
If you can’t nap during the day, this suggests that either you aren’t sleepy enough for sleep during the day (most people with insomnia are fatigued during the day rather than sleepy — just as you described) and/or arousal is making it hard to nap. So, there’s nothing particularly unusual when it comes to being unable to nap during the day.
As you pointed out, Valium (especially when combined with alcohol) doesn’t seem to be working — and that’s not unusual because those things don’t tackle the thoughts and behaviors that perpetuate sleep disruption.
The ironic thing when it comes to taking medication is that it rarely has a good long-term outcome on our sleep — if we take a pill and sleep, we believe the pill generated sleep and this erodes confidence in our natural ability to sleep. If we take a pill and don’t sleep, we believe something is wrong with our sleep and this increases arousal!
It sounds as though you have a great grasp of the behavioral techniques that can improve sleep — you might find it helpful to work with a therapist trained in CBT-I (if not already doing so) to help address the cognitive (sleep-related thoughts) side of the equation since it sounds as though that could be where the opportunity exists for you to weaken the arousal system and make sleep a bit easier!
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.
Welcome to the forum, Anil! I would suggest discussing your concerns with your doctor — you might also ask them if they feel you would be a good candidate for cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) to help address your insomnia while you are being treated for schizophrenia.
—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, McDonagh. It sounds as though your insomnia followed a well-trodden path of there being an initial precipitating event (sleep difficulty due to stifling heat) and this sleep disruption changed your relationship with sleep, ultimately leading to sleep-related worry and anxiety, and perhaps the implementation of new behaviors in an attempt to improve sleep that only seemed to perpetuate the problem.
Often, directing attention and efforts towards the implementation of different sleep-related behaviors and working on new ways of thinking about sleep can help improve sleep for the long-term.
Since you do have a history of depression and have experienced a nervous breakdown, I would suggest talking to your doctor or therapist to see if they think that you’d be a good candidate for cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I).
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.
Are you currently following any kind of sleep window, Jonas? If so, what is your biggest challenge with following that sleep window?
—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 things about sleep architecture that might be worthy of consideration here:
1. Unless our brainwaves are being measured, there’s no way to know for sure what stage of sleep we are in at any given moment
2. We have absolutely no control over sleep architecture
3. As we get older, we get less deep sleep and that is completely normalPeople with insomnia typically (and understandably!) monitor for sleep a lot more than people without insomnia and this increased state of vigilance can lead to less consolidated sleep, less restorative sleep, and the feeling that no “deep sleep” is happening — whether or not that is actually true!
What we can say with confidence is that someone is not going to get nothing other than N1 sleep indefinitely — this stage of sleep typically makes up a very small proportion of our total sleep duration and is extremely light. If someone is woken from N1 sleep, they will often report being awake rather than asleep.
N2 sleep is the “next deepest” stage of sleep. People will typically report being asleep when woken from N2 sleep. N3 sleep, often referred to as “deep sleep” occurs mainly at the start of the night and usually makes up the biggest proportion of sleep in the initial sleep cycle. The body is usually done with N3 sleep within just a few hours. People who wake during N3 sleep often feel a sense of grogginess or sleep inertia.
Ultimately, the body knows what it is doing when it comes to sleep stages. It’s not unusual for people to get no N3 sleep (especially older adults) but this doesn’t mean that someone is destined for non-restorative sleep at that point because there is more to restorative sleep than N3 sleep alone!
So, in conclusion, without a polysomnographic study, there’s no way of knowing for sure what sleep stages we are in during the night. Even with such knowledge, there’s nothing we can do to control sleep architecture since the body takes care of that all by itself. Finally, it’s probably impossible to spend the entire night exclusively in N1 sleep for any period of time.
As has been mentioned in this discussion, it’s often the hyperarousal associated with monitoring for sleep that is the biggest obstacle to more restorative sleep.
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.
I would ask that we keep posts in English, where possible! For those interested in a rough Google-powered translation of the above post, I’ve pasted it below:
Hi Cesare, I’m Italian too. I did cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia after I started suffering from it in May. Now I’m much better and I can sleep well. If you have trouble sleeping I recommend you do it too.
—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, Sally!
It’s not surprising to learn that you haven’t found sleeping tablets helpful — since no medication can generate sleep! Furthermore, as Scott suggested, sleep hygiene alone is not going to be helpful for chronic insomnia — so, again, no surprise you haven’t found that helpful, either!
The thing with sleep hygiene is it can actually lead to us implementing a whole host of rituals that increase sleep-related worry and arousal and it can reduce our quality of life by encouraging us to remove things we enjoy from our lives (such as caffeine) — all while not even helping us improve our sleep!
So, I would encourage you to enjoy that morning coffee again — and to look into cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) techniques!
CBT-I techniques are helpful because they address the thoughts and behaviors that perpetuate sleep disruption — something that no pill can do, and something that sleep hygiene certainly does not do 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.
This is a huge insight, Mandy — thank you so much for sharing!
If we have struggled with sleep for a long time, it’s very easy to go to bed before we are actually sleepy enough for sleep. We might do this with the logic that more time in bed will mean more time asleep (but the result is usually only more time awake) and we might do it because we have mistaken fatigue for sleepiness (fatigue is not the same as sleepiness).
As you also pointed out, it’s so helpful to avoid anything that might increase worry, concern, or anxiety before going to bed. We really want to be doing things that we find personally relaxing and enjoyable as bedtime approaches.
Thanks again 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.
Welcome to the forum, Kimmy! What is it about sleep that seems to generate anxiety? When you feel anxious, what is going through your mind?
—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.
Sorry to hear your coach gave you anxiety — with that in mind, it’s no surprise at all that you found it really hard to sleep that night! If you don’t mind sharing, what did your coach say that generated the anxiety?
It sounds as though you were starting to experience improvements in your sleep before that difficult night which, upon reflection, was normal and to be expected! So, I would encourage you to keep moving forward because what you were doing seemed to be helping!
—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.
Sometimes it can also be helpful not to check the time when you wake during the night since this can increase arousal and make it harder 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.
What a HUGE insight, Angel R.!!!
The more we can go about our days as normal, regardless of how we sleep, the less we worry about sleep — exactly as you have experienced!
The less we worry about sleep, the easier sleep usually becomes — exactly as you have experienced!
Thank you so much for sharing this big insight — and good on you for giving yourself the opportunity to experience these improvements by going about your day as normal and not modifying your days in response to difficult nights of sleep!
Here are a couple of videos related to this:
Adding more enjoyable moments to your life and planning fun activities reduces the power of insomnia.
If you have insomnia, what happens tonight is far less important than what you do today and tonight.
Finally, I would also like to confirm that there is no evidence that chronic insomnia causes any health problem whatsoever!
—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 are getting results because you have stayed committed, persistent, and consistent, Jay — good on you! All the improvements you are enjoying are down to your own efforts and your own, natural, ability to sleep!
To answer your questions, you could try giving yourself a clock-watching cut-off time before the start of your sleep window. So, maybe 30 minutes or an hour before the sleep window begins you no longer check the time and you just go to bed when you feel sleepy enough for sleep.
If you don’t usually sleep when you try to nap then this tells us one thing — you aren’t sleepy enough for sleep! So, perhaps you are feeling the effects of fatigue instead? If so, that’s good news since there’s a lot we can do to reduce fatigue — things like movement, physical activity, and the pursuit of things we enjoy.
It sounds as though you are still experiencing some conditioned arousal when you get into bed, and that’s normal. Just as it took time for you to learn that the bed is an unpleasant place to be, it will take time (albeit usually less time!) for you to learn that the bed is a pleasant place to be! Ultimately, we can only do that by getting out of bed whenever being in bed feels unpleasant (and only being in bed when being in bed feels pleasant).
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.
What an awful thing to be told, Joon! The good news is that you *can* get a good night’s sleep again! It’s not surprising that you haven’t found sleeping pills to be helpful since they don’t address the thoughts and behaviors that perpetuate sleep disruption. As I suspect you also realize, alcohol isn’t the answer (alcohol actually reduces sleep quality).
Have you looked into (or tried) cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I)?
—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’re doing well because you’re implementing what you’re learning and unleashing your natural ability to sleep Chee!
It might be helpful to be mindful of any covert sleep efforts that might creep into your routine — it can be so easy to believe that turning off all the lights, TVs, phones, and tablets for an hour before bedtime and then sitting alone in a dark cool place is generating sleep or sleepiness.
What all these behaviors can actually do is make you believe you need to do them in order to get a good night of sleep — this implies sleep can be controlled (when sleep cannot be controlled) and can increase arousal on any difficult nights after implementing such a ritual (as you might then feel the need to look for a new routine).
Ultimately, what we do as bedtime approaches doesn’t matter a whole lot — if you do something you find relaxing and enjoyable, that’s likely good enough!
—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.
