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So much great stuff in here — thank you for sharing!
It sounds as though the key theme shared here (from both @skyeisarose and @lynnbet) is that as we build skill in moving away from trying to control things that experience suggests cannot be directly or permanently controlled (such as how we sleep, what we think, how we feel) the less we might struggle.
Without the struggle, conditions for sleep become a lot better — because the more we try to control sleep, the more difficult it can become.
And, as we move away from trying to control our thoughts and feelings, we can free up energy and attention to do more of what matters — to better live the kind of life we want to live, independently of what our minds might be saying or doing.
This usually requires ongoing practice — new skills take time to develop!
—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, @chicca001 — you are not alone!
Reading your post, it sounds as though you have one of those very vigilant minds that is working really hard to look out for you. As it does that job (which it takes very seriously), it’s generating a lot of difficult thoughts and feelings in an effort to keep you safe and help you do what matters.
If your mind sees sleep as something that might stop you from taking care of your son (something that is, of course, very important to you) it’s going to generate a lot of difficult thoughts and feelings in relation to that (such as fear, anxiety, worry, etc).
It sounds as though you have realized that even after difficult nights, you can still take care of your son — that the thoughts and stories your mind generates might not always be 100% true or 100% accurate. That’s a big insight since it suggests that perhaps those thoughts and feelings don’t need to be gotten rid of since they’re snippets of ideas rather than facts or things that stop you from acting in a certain way.
So, with that in mind, perhaps what might be making sleep (and those difficult thoughts and feelings) more difficult might be all the effort to fight or avoid all this difficult stuff?
Does your experience tell you that trying to get rid of certain thoughts and feelings is a workable strategy? Have you found a way of permanently deleting certain thoughts and feelings from your mind or do they always seem to come back anyway, regardless of how hard you try to fight or avoid them?
What might things be like with less struggle and less battling? If, instead of trying to fight or avoid certain thoughts and feelings and instead of trying to fight or avoid nighttime wakefulness, you were able to be more of an observer of those things?
With less of a struggle, perhaps you might free up more energy and attention to do more of the things that matter — and, as you do that, perhaps all this difficult stuff might lose some of its power and influence.
Is there anything useful here?
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
Hello Carolyn and welcome to the forum. Thanks for sharing that you’ve found the success stories helpful — as you have seen, you are not alone!
It makes complete sense that you experience lots of difficult thoughts and feelings such as fear when you consider eliminating the medication completely — that’s your brain doing its job and looking out for you.
It sounds as though being focused on the number of hours of sleep you might (or might not!) get is something that’s not proving to be helpful. With that in mind, perhaps shifting your focus a little (maybe toward things you can directly control) might be more helpful?
So, for example, instead of trying to control your thoughts and feelings (or your sleep) — all things your experience might tell you cannot be directly or permanently controlled — you might practice acknowledging and making space for all that stuff to do what it’s going to do anyway, while committing to doing things that reflect who you are, who you want to be, and that help keep you moving toward the life you want to live.
If you can become more skilled in doing things that matter, independently of sleep and independently of the difficult thoughts and feelings your mind generates, perhaps all of those things might start to lose some of their power and influence. And, with less power and influence, perhaps they might require less of your attention and less intervention!
I hope there’s something useful here!
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
Hopefully someone chimes in here to say hello — since the course isn’t run on a cohort basis, there are fluctuations in the number of people working through different parts of the course. What I can say, however, is that you definitely aren’t alone!
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
Thanks for sharing. The thoughts and feelings you described can be very difficult indeed.
Do you find that lying around after work is an effective way of responding to the presence of the fatigue you described? Does that get rid of the fatigue and help you better live the kind of life you want to live?
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
Waking during the night is a normal part of sleep, so nothing too unusual there! When you wake, why do you feel you are unable 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.
Your confusion is understandable, Genie! We’ll be covering this in a lot of detail in Week 2 of the course — but there’s no need to force yourself to get out of bed just because you’re awake! What we are looking to do is practice responding to wakefulness with less struggle, since it’s the struggle that tends to make things 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.
Hello Fady! Can you share with us all the things you’ve tried up to this point, in an effort to get rid of that anxiety?
—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 might be a little bit tangled up in trying to make sleep happen and trying to get rid of wakefulness — sometimes, when that’s our focus, things can remain a bit difficult since we cannot directly control sleep.
CBT-I techniques are intended to help tackle the behaviors that can perpetuate sleep disruption — they cannot make sleep happen. Quite often, the more we try to control sleep the more we can end up struggling with it.
It might be helpful to recognize that waking during the night is a normal part of sleep. How do you currently respond to those awakenings when they happen?
—If you are ready to stop struggling with insomnia you can enroll in the online insomnia coaching course right now! If you would prefer ongoing phone or video coaching calls as part of a powerful three month program that will help you reclaim your life from insomnia, consider applying for the Insomnia Mastery program.
The content of this post is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or medical condition. It should never replace any advice given to you by your physician or any other licensed healthcare provider. Insomnia Coach LLC offers coaching services only and does not provide therapy, counseling, medical advice, or medical treatment. All content is provided “as is” and without warranties, either express or implied.
Thank you for sharing your experience — there’s a lot of scary and confusing stuff about sleep out there!
Insomnia can definitely be difficult (no doubt about that!) and yet there’s no proof that it’s going to cause a health problem or that it increases mortality (one study that involved about 37 million people found no increase in mortality in people with chronic insomnia compared to people without chronic insomnia).
So much of the difficulty can come from our understandable efforts to make sleep happen or to get rid of insomnia. Those efforts can create a struggle that can consume a huge amount of our energy and attention.
It sounds as though you’ve been moving away from that struggle and are finding that, without the struggle, you are better able to live the kind of life you want to live. And, with less struggle, conditions for sleep become a lot better, 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.
Hello John and thanks for sharing!
It’s impossible to say whether depth of sleep gets better over time since that’s something we cannot control (and trying to control what cannot be controlled often creates a struggle that makes things more difficult).
What I can say is that, quite often, the less we struggle with sleep and the less we try to control our thoughts and feelings, the more energy we can “free up” to do the things that matter to us 🙂
—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 and welcome to the forum. If you think back a few months to before you were experiencing sleep disruption, how did you approach sleep then and how did you respond to any occasional difficult nights that happened?
Is there any difference to your approach and response now, compared to the past? Perhaps there might be some insights there?
—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 Nik!
It’s great to hear that you are trying to go about your days as best as you can! It’s also great to hear that when it gets dark you are practicing acknowledging all the thoughts and feelings that your brain is generating as it does its job of looking out for you — and that you are practicing allowing those thoughts and feelings to come and go as they choose, rather than donning a suit of armor and going to war with them.
It sounds as though once you get into bed, that all goes out the window somewhat and you seem to fall back into the struggle again. And, that’s understandable since being in bed can be associated with so much struggle — it can almost feel like a bit of a habit.
Have you tried responding to the anxiety you described when you get into bed in a similar way to how you respond before you get into bed? Do you think the AWAKE exercise might help with that? If checking the time once you are in bed doesn’t seem to be helpful, perhaps that’s an action that you might want to move away from, too?
If you don’t usually get close to nine hours of sleep at night, perhaps allotting nine hours for sleep (going to bed at 10:00 PM and getting out of bed at 7:00 AM) might be setting you up for a bit of a struggle. You might want to revisit the Week 1 content about creating a sleep window, if you think a change there might 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.
Ups and downs are totally normal, Vids! Just as we all have difficult days from time to time, we all have difficult nights from time to time as well!
Since we cannot control how we sleep and since we cannot directly or permanently control what we think or how we feel, perhaps the best way to manage this is to continue to focus attention on what we can control — how we respond to this difficult stuff.
Do we fall back into the old struggle and get pulled away from doing things that matter to us? Or, do we acknowledge what’s happening, acknowledge what we are thinking and feeling, be kind to ourselves, and continue to do things that keep us moving toward the life we want to live — even when things are difficult?
Do we choose to continue to practice a more workable way forward, or do we choose to fall back into the struggle?
Also important to consider is that even if we notice we’ve fallen back into the old struggle, it’s never too late to change direction!
—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.
Sounds like a plan, Bruce!
—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.
