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Thank you so much for sharing your inspirational transformation, Fiona!
It’s quite remarkable to consider that you were battling insomnia for ten years, averaging between one and three hours of sleep — and after just eight weeks you were falling asleep within 20 minutes of getting into bed and getting at least six hours of unbroken sleep!
As you quite rightly pointed out, the techniques you learned are challenging to implement — especially during the first few weeks. However, if you remain consistent and committed, they will always get you results!
You now have the skills you need to get your sleep back on track should it ever become disrupted again in the future. You also know, from experience, that you are able to sleep naturally and you are able to improve your sleep all by yourself — without pills, gadgets, or gizmos!
Thanks again for sharing your story. It was a pleasure to work with 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.
In my experience, believing that the next day will be ruined or impossible to get through is one of the biggest beliefs among people with chronic insomnia — and this is quite ironic because people with chronic insomnia are experts when it comes to getting through the day after very little (or no) sleep!
I think it can be very helpful to evaluate any thoughts that are generating worry and anxiety because doing this in a methodical way can help us see that the thoughts we have are rarely as accurate as they first seem to be! When we can identify the flaws in these thoughts (and recognize that thoughts are just thoughts, not facts) we strip them of their power.
Furthermore, giving ourselves the opportunity to disprove them can be helpful, too. So, if a primary concern is daytime performance, making the effort to add enjoyable and enriching activities to our days can help us recognize that we have far more control over the quality of our day than our previous night of sleep 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.
Hello Ron. I am so happy to hear that you enjoyed several months of good sleep until around six weeks ago. This means that, just as you enjoyed better sleep before, you can do so again!
Did anything happen six weeks ago to trigger your most recent bout of sleep difficulties?
If you wake and no longer feel sleepy, and don’t feel worried or anxious, you might simply no longer be sleepy enough for sleep. How are you feeling during the day? Do you feel high levels of fatigue? Are you falling asleep or napping during the day?
When you were sleeping well, what time were you going to bed at night and when were you getting out of bed to start your 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.
Sorry to hear about the negative effect insomnia is having on your life. You are NOT alone, and you can get through this!
I am so encouraged that you have learned about cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) and are implementing CBT-I techniques.
These techniques do require commitment, consistency, and a lot of effort — so I would encourage you to keep going! Which techniques are you currently implementing? Is your psychologist helping 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.
Difficult nights are completely normal and to be expected! Sometimes, it can be helpful to recognize any potential external cause — in your case, you know that sleep was more difficult as soon as you started to overthink or worry about sleep.
In the short-term, you don’t really need to do anything since difficult nights from time to time are completely normal. Avoid the temptation to modify your day or compensate for a difficult night of sleep since this can make it harder for your sleep to recover.
So, if you have a bad night, continue to get out of bed at the same time. Continue with your day as normal. Stay active, don’t cancel plans, and don’t go to bed earlier the following night.
If, after a couple of weeks, sleep doesn’t improve, then you can simply re-implement all the techniques that helped you before. So, as suggested by Jennifer, you can start following a more appropriate sleep window.
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.
It sounds as though you are doing well and you are making progress, @living_tribunal! It does sound as though you have a lot of concern about how much sleep you are getting from night to night and this may be making sleep more difficult since worry and concern activate the arousal system and this suppresses sleep.
The thing about sleep is, it always happens in the end. With enough wakefulness, everyone will sleep. Another thing about sleep that’s good to know is that the body will always prioritize deep sleep and always provide you with at least the minimum amount of sleep you need to get by.
When it comes to deep sleep, this is pretty much completely over within the first third of the night. So, if you are getting somewhere between two and three hours of sleep, then you are probably getting all of your deep sleep. This is why you are still here today, after 15 years of insomnia — because your body is giving you enough sleep.
The challenge, of course, is how to get more sleep — and, ultimately, this is best achieved by removing ourselves from the process as much as possible. In other words, by abandoning any and all sleep effort. Instead, our goal should be to set the stage for sleep — by allotting an appropriate amount of time for sleep, by being active and engaged every day, by getting out of bed by the same time each day, and by getting out of bed when being in bed is unpleasant, for example.
I think a key insight you have recognized is that going to bed only when you feel sleepy enough for sleep is really helpful! The clock doesn’t know when you are sleepy — so, if you are still following a sleep window, try to see the start of that sleep window as your earliest possible bedtime and only go to bed if and when you feel sleepy enough for sleep. Try to stick to a consistent out of bed time, though, to give your body clock a strong morning anchor.
I am confident that if you remain committed to cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) and keep looking forward, you will continue to find success. This is a marathon rather than a sprint!
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, Nige!
It is not uncommon for insomnia to get worse upon retirement — and that’s because when we are working we are forced into having some sort of structure to our days and nights (for example, we have to get up by a certain time in order to get to work on time).
When this structure is removed, we can end up going to bed at all hours and getting out of bed at all hours — and this irregularity disrupts sleep drive, disrupts the body clock, and leads to heightened arousal.
Have you tried implementing cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) techniques? I am confident that you’ll find this very helpful since they help address the thoughts and behaviors that are making sleep difficult while strengthing sleep drive and your body clock and weakening the arousal system.
—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, Jess! I am confident that cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) techniques will help you since they address the perpetuating factors behind insomnia — in other words, they address (and fix) the cause of ongoing sleep disruption!
—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 am so glad to hear that you are sleeping well at the moment, and getting between six and nine hours of sleep on most nights.
Building sufficient sleep drive can really help when it comes to falling asleep. If you are getting between six and nine hours of sleep each night, this suggests that you are allotting a lot of time for sleep or you don’t have a consistent sleep schedule. This can make it more difficult to sleep at night, and this can feed into sleep-related worry.
Feeling anxious about sleep is completely understandable if you have been struggling with sleep for a long time. It can be really helpful to evaluate the accuracy of the thoughts you have that lead to worry and anxiety — when you do this, you will often be able to recognize that the thought isn’t is accurate is it first seemed.
A common worry is about next day performance — how the day will be ruined or impossible if you don’t get a good night of sleep. If you are able to take a step back and remember all the good days (or at least the positive or OK moments) that happened after a hard night of sleep you can see that this thought that might be generating so much worry isn’t even all that accurate!
It can also be helpful to make a conscious effort to add enjoyable, enriching, and rewarding activities to your day as much as possible. This not only improves the quality of your life, but it helps you recognize that you can have good days (or good moments) after a hard night, and it distracts you from thinking and worrying endlessly about 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.
Have you looked into cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) techniques? These will address the actual cause of chronic insomnia, which is always inappropriate and/or incorrect sleep-related thoughts and behaviors. Tackling the cause of your sleep disruption is probably going to be more helpful over the long-term than medication.
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. Can you tell us a bit more about your sleep? When do you go to sleep at night, when do you get out of bed to start your day, and roughly how many hours do you get on an average night?
Do you typically find it hard to fall asleep at the start of the night, or do you tend to struggle with waking during the night and finding it hard to fall back to sleep (or both)?
—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 almost certainly experiencing a placebo effect to the melatonin — especially when we consider how long you’ve been taking it.
Melatonin is not an effective treatment for chronic insomnia because melatonin does not trigger sleep. Melatonin is more of a signal for sleep. The body releases a pulse of melatonin at a certain point in the evening and a few hours later we become ready for sleep.
This pulse of melatonin usually happens around two or three hours before our usual bedtime but it’s impossible to know exactly when this happens without lab testing. Any supplemental melatonin you might take after this pulse happens is ignored by the body.
Even if you get lucky and manage to take a melatonin supplement before your body triggers this melatonin signal, still nothing really happens because people with chronic insomnia do not usually have a problem with melatonin production or melatonin regulation!
Is the melatonin prescribed to you by a doctor? If so, you might want to discuss a tapering-off plan with your prescribing physician. I would suggest implementing cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) techniques so you can address the real cause of your sleep difficulties (sleep-related thoughts and behaviors) and as you start to regain confidence in your natural ability to sleep you can then eliminate or taper-off the melatonin.
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.
If you go to bed with a clear mind and feel happy and relaxed, but still find it hard to fall asleep, this simply suggests that you aren’t yet sleepy enough for sleep.
Nights of “rollercoaster sleep” as you described are quite common when we aren’t following a regular or appropriate sleep schedule.
You might find this video helpful: How to stop the sleep roller coaster and make sleep more consistent and more predictable.
—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 current relationship with sleep is completely understandable! Experiencing four to six nights of terrible sleep each week is always going to lead to sleep-related worry and concern.
With that being said, this means you are also experiencing one to three nights of better sleep each week — so this proves that you are capable of sleep, and that sleep ALWAYS happens in the end!
Sleep is not an ability. It’s not something we forget how to do. Sleep is a core biological process — so, with enough wakefulness, sleep will always happen. So, we don’t need to be worried or nervous about sleep since this only makes sleep more difficult and means we need to build more sleep drive (in other words, be awake for longer) in order to make sleep happen.
The best way to improve sleep for the long-term is to implement cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) techniques since these address the thoughts and behaviors that perpetuate insomnia and disrupt sleep drive, disrupt the body clock, and heighten arousal.
I hope this helps. You can get through this and you do not need to live with insomnia forever!
—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 always starts with one bad night of sleep — how we respond to that bad night often determines how long that sleep disruption will stick around.
Unfortunately, the more we think and worry about sleep, the more effort we put into sleep, and the more behaviors we change in response to poor sleep, the more difficult it becomes for our sleep to recover.
When do you go to sleep at night, when do you get out of bed to start your day, and roughly how many hours do you get on an average night?
Do you typically find it hard to fall asleep at the start of the night, or do you tend to struggle with waking during the night and finding it hard to fall back to sleep (or both)?
—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.
