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Welcome to the forum and I’m sorry to hear about your recent struggles with sleep. The good news is that since this problem began recently, it should be easier to address.
When do you normally go to bed at night, and when do you normally get out of bed to start your day in the mornings?
—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 think that if you try to get out of bed by the same time every day you will be off to a great start. Here’s a quick video on why this is so important:
I also suggest that you keep a basic sleep diary for a week so you can record when you go to bed and get out of bed and how many hours of sleep you get. Then, when you look back after a week you will have a better idea of your average nightly sleep duration.
Add half an hour onto your average nightly duration and use that as your initial sleep window (but make sure that you allow at least 5.5 hours for sleep).
More in this can be found on the sleep restriction page.
Good luck!
—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 so hard for me to read this discussion thread (and that’s why I haven’t contributed much) because I just can’t see how staying in bed with anxious thoughts about sleep is constructive.
I know the goal of ACT is to ‘let go’ — and this can certainly be effective, but if you have high levels of anxiety I just can’t see it being helpful compared to getting out of bed.
Getting out of bed when unable to sleep has so many benefits:
1. It reduces the amount of time you spend in bed awake and frustrated (so you don’t associate the bed with wakefulness and anxiety)
2. It removes you from the bed when you can’t sleep (so you only associate the bed with sleep, not wakefulness and anxiety)
3. It prevents you from staying in bed ‘trying’ to sleep (trying to sleep immediately makes sleep more difficult)
4. It empowers you — when you can’t sleep, you know exactly what to do (get out of bed until you feel sleepy again)If you have amazing mind control and can simply ‘let go’ and accept sleeplessness then I can see ACT being helpful. However, if you have high levels of anxiety about being awake during the night, I just cannot see how staying in bed, tossing and turning, worrying about sleep, is helpful in any way 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.
Is there any particular reason why you don’t practice sleep/bedtime restriction, Edgar?
Generally speaking, the bed should only be used for sleep (and sex). That’s because we want to ‘relearn’ to associate the bed with sleep and nothing else. Think of it this way — when we have insomnia, we have learned to associate the bed with wakefulness. This behavior is learned (we didn’t always have this association) so it can be ‘unlearned’. This is best done using stimulus control techniques.
There’s nothing wrong with practicing a meditation exercise in bed — particularly if you find that it helps you to fall asleep. Remember, though, that the goal of meditation is relaxation, not sleep. So, when you meditate it’s important to recognize that you are meditating to promote relaxation and not as a way of making you sleep.
How long do you typically meditate for when in bed? If you are meditating for longer than half an hour, then I would suggest trying to move the meditation out of the bedroom. Otherwise, if you find it helpful, and the meditation period is relatively short, I think it’s fine to continue doing this in bed if you find it helps you relax and prepare for 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.
It certainly sounds as though you have a psychological dependence on the melatonin pills, Steve.
The fact of the matter is this — melatonin supplements are of no use for chronic insomnia.
Here’s how the body uses melatonin to help us sleep:
A few hours before our usual bedtime, the body pulses a nice dose of melatonin through our system. A few hours later, we are ready for sleep.
Every single person’s body emits this pulse of melatonin at a different time. It’s impossible to know with any real certainty when this happens in our own body without undergoing lab testing (and this isn’t even available in the US — but I believe there are a couple of labs in Canada that do it).
So, here’s the problem. If you take supplemental melatonin after the body has triggered this pulse of natural melatonin, the body ignores it. It’s just noise. It has absolutely no effect.
If you get lucky and somehow manage to take the supplemental melatonin before your body triggers its natural melatonin pulse, it still won’t be very effective — because people with insomnia have no problem with melatonin production or regulation!
The only time melatonin supplements can sometimes be helpful is for circadian rhythm sleep disorders — and even then, the evidence is relatively weak and we still don’t know when the best time to take the supplemental melatonin is (for reasons already described).
Also, in the United States at least, what you actually get when you buy melatonin can be very different from what is on the label. This study found melatonin content ranged from 83% less to 478% more than the labeled content (and eight of the supplements tested contained serotonin — a controlled substance used in the treatment of several neurological disorders).
So, being armed with all this knowledge will hopefully help you recognize that the melatonin is unlikely to be having any physiological effect on your sleep.
It can be helpful to try a tapering-off plan if you are finding it hard to quit cold turkey. You could try something like this:
1) Start by reducing your dose in half on two nights per week. Choose easier nights when there is little pressure or work obligations the following day but avoid consecutive nights.
2) Once you feel you are sleeping well on the two reduced dosage nights (this may happen immediately or may take a week or two), you can cut the dose in half every other night.
3) When you are sleeping well on the half dosage nights, you then take the half dose every night.
4) After the dose has been reduced by half on all medication nights, the remaining half dose is eliminated in the same gradual fashion (e.g., the remaining half dose is eliminated two nights a week, then every other night, then every night).Finally, do not take the melatonin contingently. Decide in advance whether tonight will be a reduction/elimination night and stick to that no matter what.
When we take a pill contingently (ie based on how we sleep on a given night), we create a very powerful association in our mind that we are incapable of sleeping without that pill. In other words, we attribute sleep to the supplement or drug rather than recognizing that we slept because of our own natural ability to sleep.
When we take a supplement or drug and have a bad night, we don’t recognize the ineffectiveness of the supplement or drug — instead, we think that our sleep system is somehow broken. So, our perception of our natural ability to sleep is continuously eroded.
Good luck, and 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.
That would be great, Steve!
—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 SIimon. Although there is no evidence that chronic insomnia causes any health problem, it would certainly not surprise me to find that people with chronic insomnia have higher levels of cortisol due to the stress and worry associated with finding it hard to sleep.
You mentioned that you tried CBT-I and it didn’t work for you. Although you could be one of the 10-20% of the population it doesn’t seem to work for, I tend to find most people who determine the treatment didn’t work for them sometimes weren’t given the support they needed to be successful.
Can you tell me a bit more about the CBT-I you tried? Was it online or face-to-face? What kind of techniques did you implement, and why do you think they didn’t work for you? Hopefully, I can offer some guidance and advice.
—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, Edgar. Are you typically very sleepy when you go to bed at night? Do you sometimes struggle to stay awake until it’s ‘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.
I am sorry to hear about your ongoing struggles with sleep. Can you describe an average night? When do you normally go to bed, when do you get out of bed in the morning, and roughly how many hours of sleep are you getting each 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 Carls and welcome to the forum.
First, let me reassure you that you have not lost the ability to sleep. Your insomnia can go away, and you can sleep well again.
Can you tell us a bit more about your sleep? When do you go to bed, when do you get out of bed in the morning, and roughly how many hours of sleep do you get on a typical night? Can you talk us through an average 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 Tania and I’m sorry to hear about your struggles with sleep. When do you normally go to bed at night, and when do you normally get out of bed in the morning to start your day?
Do you tend to struggle more initially falling asleep at the start of the night, or do you find that you wake during the night and find it hard 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.
To be honest, I am quite surprised to hear that a CBT-I counselor wants to also try hypnotism. That’s because hypnotism is not a component of CBT-I and no evidence exists to support its use as an effective treatment for chronic insomnia.
I did find this old forum discussion on hypnosis for insomnia — it doesn’t seem to have been effective for anyone who contributed to that thread, but I would be interested to hear from anyone who found it helpful.
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
It’s completely normal for major life stresses to disrupt sleep — this happens to everyone and can’t really be ‘fixed’ because this is natural and so there’s nothing to be fixed.
If you are struggling with sleep at least three nights per week and this has been ongoing for at least three months, then CBT-I techniques can help get your sleep back on track.
—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 sure you will find CBT-I to be helpful — I hope you aren’t waiting too long for that referral! I am not a therapist, but I do use CBT-I techniques when working with clients because this is the best way to address insomnia and improve sleep over the long term.
—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, Amir. Are you currently receiving treatment for your depression?
—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.
