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Glad to hear your sleep has been improving — and that you got six-and-a-half hours of sleep on both Saturday and Sunday nights. This should serve as reassurance that you are still capable of sleep!
I appreciate your comments that the idea of getting out of bed during the night can make you feel anxious — however, let me ask you this… how does staying in bed, tossing and turning when unable to sleep feel?
Practicing relaxation techniques when in bed can certainly be helpful — but I would suggest that if they aren’t helping you sleep after a reasonable amount of time (say, roughly half an hour), getting out of bed might be a better strategy because it will ensure that you don’t fall into the tempting trap of ‘trying’ to sleep (which immediately makes sleep more difficult).
It sounds as though you are implementing a number of positive techniques to improve your sleep. Keep up the effort, and I’ve no doubt that your sleep will continue to improve!
—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, and I’m sorry to hear about your sleep struggles. You are now among others who know what you are going through and want to offer you all the support you deserve.
You mentioned that you have been affected by poor sleep for around two years. Do you recall what originally triggered your sleep issues two years ago?
Moving forward to today, what do you think is the biggest obstacle preventing you from getting the sleep you are looking for? Is it your snoring partner, neuropathic pain, or something else?
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
Glad to hear you are implementing effective techniques in a bid to improve your sleep — and that you are now naturally falling asleep around your allotted bedtime (this is a symptom of a healthy and strong sleep/wake cycle).
You mentioned that you tend to get six hours of sleep and that your sleep efficiency is good. So, this suggests that you are allotting somewhere in the region of six to six-and-a-half hours for sleep. Does this sound about right?
—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 important to note that sleep hygiene alone is not an effective treatment for insomnia. Although it’s a good idea to practice good sleep hygiene, it’s unlikely that it will address long-term sleep problems. In fact, in clinical studies, the control (or ‘no intervention’) group are usually given sleep hygiene advice!
You might find this article interesting:
https://www.healthcentral.com/article/why-sleep-hygiene-probably-wont-cure-your-insomnia
Although I wouldn’t advocate for three hours of sleep being healthy, recognizing that we all have different sleep requirements can definitely be helpful. There is no universal amount of sleep that is suitable for everyone — you should judge whether you are getting enough sleep at night primarily upon how you feel during the day.
I hope this is 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.
Short-term sleep disturbance is to be expected when you quit smoking. If this manifests into a long-term problem, CBT-I techniques can be 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.
Have you tried implementing techniques associated with CBT for insomnia (particularly sleep restriction and stimulus control)?
—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. Would you say that tinnitus is the biggest obstacle to your sleep at the current time, or do you feel that worry has more of an influence?
—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 little wonder that you are losing your zest for life and focus when living with the sleep issues you are describing. Do you find that your biggest difficulty is falling asleep at the start of the night, or is your problem related more to waking during the night and finding it hard to fall back to sleep?
Right now you are allotting roughly seven hours for sleep each night. How many hours of sleep do you think you get on a typical night?
To answer your other questions — simply reply to a forum topic to reply to a post (there is no ability to send private messages through the forum). I use CBT-I techniques to overcome sleep issues — and I believe I covered jerks when trying to sleep in a previous forum topic.
—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.
Sleep restriction uses your average nightly sleep duration taken over one or two weeks. So, I suggest keeping a sleep diary for at least one week (ideally two). Each morning, write down how much sleep you got the previous night. After one or two weeks, calculate your average nightly sleep duration.
Once you know your average nightly sleep duration, add half an hour to this time and you will have a suggested amount of time to allot for sleep (if this is less than five-and-a-half hours, stick to allotting five-and-a-half hours for sleep).
Here’s a more detailed overview of sleep restriction.
I would suggest speaking with your doctor before practicing sleep restriction due to your medical history. Sleep compression may be a better alternative for you — this involves reducing the amount of time you allot for sleep by 20 minutes or so each week until the amount of time you allot for sleep more closely matches your average nightly sleep duration.
—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 that, Eva. What time do you usually go to bed? What do you think is stopping you from falling back to sleep when you wake at 3:00 AM or 4:00 AM?
—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 know it feels very frustrating to experience a night of poor sleep after a night of good sleep. Such a cycle is actually not uncommon among those with sleep issues — but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating!
Do you have a regular sleep schedule, Pam? You mentioned that you usually go to sleep at 11:00 PM. Are you also making sure you get out of bed by the same time every day? If so, what is that time?
It’s important to note that having a regular out of bedtime in the morning is probably more important than having a regular bedtime because strictly observing a regular bedtime might lead to you going to bed before you are sleepy and ready for sleep. As soon as you do that, you are setting yourself up for being awake in bed — and this can trigger sleep-related worry, making sleep more difficult.
—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 your current sleep issues, praymore — they must be very concerning for you. Can you tell me a bit more about your current sleep patterns? What time do you normally go to bed, when do you normally get out of bed, and roughly how many hours of sleep do you get on a typical 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.
Welcome to the forum, Healthyliving. When we suddenly experience sleep issues after sleeping well for as long as we can remember, it can be worrying. When we go through a long stretch of poor sleep it can lead to further worry and anxiety — and this can then trigger a vicious cycle of ever-increasing anxiety and ever-worse sleep.
As suggested by kobalap, you definitely didn’t exhibit good sleep hygiene in the past — but this is unlikely to be a major contributor to your current sleep issues.
As soon as we start to pay more attention to sleep, we make sleep more difficult. That’s because sleep is an involuntary process — we can’t actually control sleep. We can’t make ourselves fall asleep within a certain amount of time, and we can’t make ourselves sleep for a certain amount of time.
When we start to worry about sleep, we often do things in a bid to improve our sleep that actually make sleep more difficult (such as going to bed earlier, staying in bed longer, taking daytime naps, calling in sick to work, canceling plans with friends, etc).
The few bad nights you had shivering in bed may have triggered your current sleep issues — because all cases of insomnia start with one bad night of sleep. I have no idea why shivering is leading to vomiting — you should discuss that with your doctor.
Experiencing jerks when falling asleep are common and aren’t typically something to worry about. They could be hypnic jerks, or they could be caused by self-monitoring behavior whereby your mind keeps checking to see if you are asleep and when it notices you are, it abruptly wakes you up to tell you. You might find this forum thread helpful:
You mentioned a belief that people need eight hours of sleep each night — but this is not true and is actually a common belief that is completely inaccurate. We all need different amounts of sleep. One person may only ‘need’ six hours of sleep, while another may ‘need’ seven. There is no universal sleep requirement — so try to avoid putting any pressure or expectation on yourself to get a certain amount of sleep.
Sleep hypnosis doesn’t have much in the way of clinical evidence to support its use as a treatment option for insomnia. A far better option is CBT for insomnia (CBT-I). CBT-I is recommended as the first-line treatment option for insomnia by the National Institutes of Health, the American College of Physicians, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, and the British Association for Psychopharmacology.
Sleep deprivation will never reach the point of death because at a certain point your body will take over and force you to sleep. Right now, your mind (specifically, your arousal system) is overriding your body’s natural urge to sleep. Eventually, the urge to sleep becomes so strong that it overpowers your arousal system and leads to sleep. At this time, the arousal system can once again take over — and this explains why some people find they go with very little sleep for most of the week, have one or two days of great sleep, then go back to consecutive nights of poor sleep.
CBT-I techniques will help reduce the power of your arousal system and strengthen your natural propensity to sleep and this is why it’s such an effective long-term option for improving 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.
Way to go! As you rightly identified, your body knows how to sleep and it never loses the ability to sleep. Learning to accept this (which can be challenging and take time) often leads to less anxiety and better sleep.
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
Welcome to the forum, impendia and thank you for the great questions!
First of all, it’s important to bear in mind that sleep restriction is just one component of CBT for insomnia and so, for the best results, it should be combined with other components (such as stimulus control).
Short awakenings during the night are actually quite normal and tend to occur when we emerge from one sleep cycle in order to begin another one. I wouldn’t pay much heed to your Fitbit claiming insufficient deep sleep because the only way to determine if you are in deep sleep is by measuring brainwaves (to my knowledge, a Fitbit is unable to do this!).
Consumer sleep trackers aren’t always accurate, and relying on the data they produce can increase sleep-related anxiety and further harm sleep for those with long-term sleep issues. For this reason, I urge people with chronic insomnia not to use such devices.
If you are sleeping for a number of hours before waking, it’s far more likely than not that you are getting adequate deep sleep because the body gets the vast majority of deep sleep early in the night. So, early morning awakenings are unlikely to be having a dramatic effect on the amount of deep sleep you are getting.
Do you snore (or have you ever been told that you snore) loudly during the night? Do you ever wake, gasping for breath, or with a headache or dry mouth? If so, these may be symptoms of sleep apnea and you should ask your doctor about getting a sleep study to confirm or rule this out.
How do you feel during the day? Do you feel you struggle to get through each day? Do you randomly fall asleep or feel as though you might fall asleep during the day? Do you take daytime naps?
Finally, you mentioned that your set bedtime is 10:30 PM and that you never go to bed earlier than this. That’s a good strategy, but here are a couple of extra details. First, when 10:30 PM comes around, if you don’t feel sleepy and ready for sleep then you shouldn’t go to bed until you do feel sleepy. See 10:30 PM as your earliest possible bedtime and not necessarily your regular evening bedtime.
Second, you should also have a regular out of bed time in the morning, based on your average nightly sleep duration. So, let’s say your average nightly sleep duration is six hours. Add half an hour onto this time (to provide some time for falling asleep and short nighttime awakenings), and you have a sleep window of six-and-a-half hours. With this example, your sleep window would end at 5:00 AM each day and so you should be getting out of bed by 5:00 AM every day, including weekends.
Edgar — You mentioned that you fall asleep around 10:00 PM and wake between 4:30 AM and 5:30 AM. This suggests that you normally get between six-and-a-half hours and seven-and-a-half hours of sleep each night. Since this is within the normal range, I wonder if something else could be at play that could explain why you find it hard to feel well through the day. Perhaps you might benefit from a bit more sleep, but perhaps sleep isn’t the only influence on how you feel during the day — maybe your work or other daytime stressors are a bigger influence? Have you tried shifting your bedtime to start slightly earlier?
—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.
