Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Night three did not go as planned. I was so sleepy that I decided that I would increase my sleep window to 6 hours.
I woke up at around 2.30 am like I always do to use the toilet. When I came back to bed I was expecting to fall asleep quickly like the previous night, but I could not go back to sleep.
I had to drive the following morning, which gave me anxiety about getting enough sleep. It would be dangerous for me to drive while severely sleep deprived.
I finally fell asleep at around 6 am, but I set my alarm to 8 am to give me a few more hours of sleep so I could drive safely.
I am typing this at 8 pm and the drowsiness is so unbearable that it’s giving me a headache. I am probably going to give in and take a nap…Day two: not as bad as I thought it would be!
On the first night, I made a mistake and went to bed an hour before I should have, so my sleep window was 8 hours instead of 7 like I planned.
I ended up sleeping for only 4 1/2 hours as expected. However, I got out of bed at 6.30 am as planned. I did not feel as bad as I thought I would. Neither did I feel like a complete zombie during the day as I expected. Exercising and being physically active during the day kept away any drowsiness. I successfully did not nap!For night two, I decided to restrict my sleeping hours to 5 1/2 for the rest of the week. It was very difficult to stay awake in the final hours before 1 am, but I managed to do it! Once I got in bed, I was out almost immediately. I think it took only around five minutes for me to fall asleep.
I successfully got out of bed at 6.30 am.
Sleep efficiency was above 85%! I only woke up once during the night to pee, and fell asleep again in about 15 minutes.
I don’t feel any worse after getting out of bed than I did the day before.This is highly motivating! I haven’t fallen asleep so quickly for a long, long time! Neither did it feel excruciatingly difficult to get out of bed. Although I still feel tired with a bit of brain fog, surprisingly it is not much worse than how I usually feel. I’m looking forward to how this day and this night’s sleep goes!
I’m going to try SRT myself tonight, and I just KNOW it’s going to be a nightmare! So the only thing to do is take a deep breath and do it!
It’s very difficult to get rid of 15 years of bad habits. The urge to sleep is kind of like a drug addiction, so you’re not going to do everything perfect first time, far from it.
Perhaps set an alarm to wake up 7 am (or whenever), then when it goes off, try to force yourself out of bed and stand up. Once you’ve done that, if you’re dying to go back to bed, allow yourself. You have achieved getting out of bed. Do this until it becomes a habit.
Then gradually increase the time you are out of bed and do something active (like walk around your room) before returning to sleep: 5 minutes, 10 minutes, etc. Don’t think after failure you have to start from scratch. Progress is progress, no matter how small. ‘Gamify’ it. Try to beat your record.
If the task seems too hard, break it up into smaller, easier chunks. For example, if it’s too difficult to get out of bed immediately after the alarm goes off, then try to gradually reduce the time you spend in bed after the alarm goes off: 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 1 minute, until you can finally get out of bed immediately.
I hope my advice helps!Thanks for the words of encouragement, baggypepperowl!
Now that I think of it, there is a deeper reason why I give up completely after napping: I feel like I’m a lost cause.
I assume, without any proof, that my brain tumour caused irreversible damage to the part of my brain responsible for sleep. This mindset pretty much guarantees failure, I think. This time, I will NOT assume that.
I will assume that I AM capable of refreshing, energizing, and restorative sleep, no matter how bad I feel during the day time.
And if I cave in to the urge to nap, I won’t give up completely. I won’t think I’m a lost cause. I will keep going!Hello! I also had thoughts of dying from not sleeping, and I’ll never sleep again. But it was all just nonsense due to my sleep anxiety.
You need to challenge those irrational thoughts. You can imagine yourself waving a magic wand like a Hogwarts student.
“I’ll never sleep again”. Riddikulus! You just had a 6-hour long nap yesterday. You obviously haven’t lost the ability to sleep. Just the ability to sleep at night!
“I’ll die from not sleeping”. Riddikulus! Many people on this forum use a technique called Sleep Restriction. They set a strict sleeping schedule that deliberately deprives them of sleep by only allowing them to go to bed between a certain time like 12.30 am to 6 am. That’s only 5 and 1/2 hours. Personally, I’ve only had between 3 to 5 hours’ sleep per day in the last 3 days by following this technique. But I don’t worry about sleeping so little, because I know I won’t die from it. When your brain goes without sleep for long enough, it will sleep, unless there are torturers physically waking you back up by chucking you in a swimming pool or something.
Look under the “resources” menu at the top of this page and sign up for the Free Insomnia Sleep Training course.
I hope you get rid of your insomnia soon. Good luck!
Hi, Martin. Since I’m unemployed, I usually stay in bed and try to get more sleep if I still feel tired, getting up at 11 am or 1 pm. I also nap in the afternoon.
Last night I decided to get serious with your free insomnia sleep training course. I set my get-out-of-bed time to 8.30 am (because I know I’m an owl), and my allotted sleep time to 5 1/2 hours.
I didn’t feel sleepy enough at 3 am, so I went to bed at 4 am and I estimate that it took 30 minutes to fall asleep.
I woke up at 6.05 am to pee. When I went back to bed, I think it took around 15 minutes to fall asleep.
I woke up again at 8.03 am and stayed in bed until 8.20 am. Next time I’ll get out of bed as soon as I wake up if it’s within 30 minutes of my morning anchor.
So my estimated total sleep time was approximately 3 hours. But after having a cup of coffee, I didn’t feel tired at all, which is surprising! I thought I would feel wrecked on 3 hours of sleep, but I realise that I probably don’t need as much sleep as I thought I did.
My previous experiences of sleeping only 3 hours were awful. I believe it was different this time because I built up enough sleep pressure and got the timing right by going to bed during the sleep phase of my circadian rhythm.
I’ll see how tonight goes.
Has anyone heard of a guy named Piotr Wozniak and his “formula” called “Free Running Sleep”? I’ve been reading through his article and it has unique information that I have never heard of before from insomnia advice websites:
https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/sleep#Formula_for_good_sleep
I think it makes for pretty interesting reading, although it isn’t practical for people that work at set times.
There are a few things he says in the articles in there (all of his sleep “articles” are on one very, very long page) that are absolutely not helpful for sleep anxiety: “If you do not sleep, you die!”, “lack of sleep will kill your brain cells!”
In fact, when I read those articles, my sleep immediately got worse. So when you come across those, just skip them.
It’s best to take everything he says with a grain of salt, especially when it goes against all conventional insomnia advice.
His formula can basically be summed up as follows:
- Don’t use sleeping pills, alcohol, or marijuana to help you sleep.
- Go to bed at the right time, which is the time when you can fall asleep within 5-10 minutes. Any earlier and you either won’t be able to fall asleep (sleep-onset insomnia), or you’ll fall asleep and wake up prematurely without feeling refreshed (sleep-maintenance insomnia). If you don’t know what the right time is, you can find out via trial and error using a sleep diary.
- Don’t use an alarm clock to wake you up. Allow your brain to awaken when it wants to and get out of bed as soon as you wake up.
- Nap at the right time, which is approximately 7 hours after awakening naturally. Don’t nap too late because it will reduce the quality of your night-time sleep.
He claims that the majority of insomnia cases for people who are otherwise healthy are due to their circadian rhythm being delayed and out of sync with societal norms by several hours, and that they either sleep too early and then wake up too early or they can’t get to sleep at all because it isn’t their bedtime yet.
So, for example, Mac0908, when you go to bed at 10.30pm feeling excruciatingly tired, you might have a huge amount of sleep pressure, but your bedtime is still out of sync with your circadian rhythm, so at 5 am you wake up having “paid off” the sleep pressure before you’ve completed your circadian rhythm’s sleep phase, therefore you still feel tired. In order to wake up in the morning feeling great, you need to get the timing right by going to bed 2-5 hours later so that you start reducing your sleep pressure at the same time your circadian rhythm enters the sleep phase. This double whammy will completely knock you out within minutes and you’ll wake up refreshed. If you can’t stay up that late, then forget about stimulus control and do something to help keep you awake (watch an interesting program on TV and keep the lights on. Don’t drink caffeine!)
Allowing yourself to wake up naturally without an alarm clock is very impractical advice if you have to go to work early. However, an alarm clock will disturb the sleep process and you’ll wake up feeling unrefreshed.
If the theory is true then the best strategy (which completely goes against conventional advice) is to take a two week holiday to pay off your sleep debt, work on your anxiety, and gradually push your bedtime later by an hour every day until you come full circle to your desired bedtime, then use stimulus control and an alarm clock to prevent that bedtime from getting later and later.
This may be a load of bull****, but the theory does seem very logical and interesting to me.
I woke up again tonight. I went to bed at 11pm, and I think I lay there for a long time – I didn’t check the clock. When I was in bed I didn’t really feel that tired, but sleepy enough to make my eyes water. (When I start getting sleepy, my eyes start watering. Does anyone else get that?)
I think that was a mistake, I should have gone to bed at 12am like I did the past several days.
I’ve moved from sleep onset insomnia to maintenance insomnia.
I woke up at 2:38, feeling excruciatingly tired as if I hadn’t slept for days. This is weird because I didn’t really feel that sleep deprived before. It’s as if I woke up during a time when my brain was doing something important and was suddenly interrupted. I didn’t wake up from needing to pee but from a pretty scary dream. Usually when I have bad dreams I sort them out within the dream and don’t wake up.
But this is the first time I’ve been woken up by a nightmare and I was afraid to fall asleep again because of it. It could also have to do with my frustration and disappointment that I didn’t sleep through the night, and also the anxiety that the problem may actually be a physical health problem, rather than it just all being in my head.
I also woke with a full erection (sorry if this is too much information). I always wake up frequently needing to pee with a full erection. I didn’t need to go to the toilet this time, but I still woke up with morning wood, as if my brain was just going through the motions.
So I decided to take a few sips of water, eat a slice of wholemeal toast, take half a tablet of zopiclone that my doctor prescribed me, and write this post.
Writing is getting hard and harder because I’m losing my ability to focus. That’s probably the zopiclone kicking it.
I’m going back to bed. Goodnight.
I think I need to clarify what I mean. I only experience these shocks when I’m falling asleep At night I sleep a few hours and then awake suddenly due to needing to pee or other unknown reason. This leaves me extremely unrefreshed. It’s when I’m trying to fall asleep after that when I experience these ‘shocks’.
I do experience a dry mouth in the morning. I also feel a dry mouth randomly throughout the day for some reason. This just happened recently when I developed my insomnia.
I don’t think I have sleep apnea, because I use a sleep tracking app that also records noise and snoring, and there’s never been a point where I notice my breathing stop.
Yeah, that happens to me too. The anxiety is still there in the back of my mind, trying to pull me back. It’s really difficult to “fight” because our instinct is to resist and struggle when we should be doing the exact opposite, relaxing and accepting our thoughts and fears. That’s a very difficult thing to do, but if we keep practising, little by little we can learn the skill of relaxing into sleep.
Last night I woke up 3 times to go to the toilet, and each time it got harder and harder for me to get back to sleep because I could feel the anxiety at the back of my mind. It’s so difficult, but I am going to master it!
Tonight I’m going to be prepared by not drinking anything 4 hours before my bedtime. If I get thirsty, I’ll just take a few sips of water, not a whole cup.
By the way, I also suffer from headaches due to insomnia, and it’s extra frightening for me because I have a brain tumour. I have to keep telling myself to relax, that my headache has nothing to do with the tumour and it’s all because of my lack of sleep.
I’m glad you got some sleep.
Are you the sole provider for your family? If so, I can understand your fear because you are under a lot of stress to perform well in your job, and you also have the horrible experience of insomnia 10 years ago.
You need to think positive thoughts. Even if you don’t believe it right now, tell yourself confident things like, “I had severe insomnia 10 years ago, but I got over it and I can get over this too!”
I don’t mean to alarm you by bringing up my brain tumour. I wish I hadn’t mentioned it because it just added to your anxiety. Please don’t worry about cancer or anything like that. I believe that my insomnia has nothing to do with my brain tumour, it’s purely psychological.
Of course, saying “don’t worry” will probably have the opposite effect, and you might worry about the fact that you can’t stop worrying. This leaves you trapped in a vicious cycle. I think a good way to combat this is to just focus your attention on deep breathing and let your thoughts go. Don’t actively try to stop those thoughts. If they’re there, they’re there. Just leave them be and focus on your breathing. It’s not a magic bullet, it takes practice to make it work. But in the long term, I think it’s a good strategy.
I’m not familiar with zquil so I can’t say anything about that.
I think that the “dream-like state” you were experiencing was stage 1 NREM sleep. The feeling of drifting is you being asleep, even though you don’t feel like you are.
Hello, it’s me, the guy that brought up the subject of sleep jolts.
Before I developed insomnia, I used to experience sleep jolts/hypnic jerks whenever I stayed up way too late and was dead tired. Back then I didn’t make a big deal over them and quickly fell back to sleep.
This time is different, and I’ll tell you why, but it’s a long story.
In June 2017 I was diagnosed with a brain tumour. The surgery to remove part of the tumour was a success and my recovery was fantastic.
That’s the background context of how I developed insomnia.
Two months ago my sleep was all over the place because I was unemployed. I was sleeping in the afternoon, awake late at night, and I never really paid attention to strict bedtimes. I just slept whenever I wanted.
But because of this, I felt sleepy all the time. I read an article online about people who get good sleep feel “superhuman” and have limitless energy during the day. Well, I wanted to feel this way too, so I started following sleep “hygiene” rules, including setting strict bedtimes and no napping.
But instead of sleeping better, my sleep got worse and worse. It got so bad that I thought it was because my brain tumour was growing again, or that the brain cells in the sleep centres of my brain were dying. After I began to think that my sleep COLLAPSED. I associated my lack of sleep with my tumour/brain damage and started to be afraid. Also, I started to believe that being sleep deprived was doing further damage to my brain. It was a downward spiral. So now when I get sleep jolts, I’m worried that my brain isn’t working correctly and is “not allowing me” to sleep.
I realise now that it is FEAR which is not allowing myself to sleep. My insomnia is purely psychological NOT biological in origin.
I’ve been trying to reason and reassure myself over the past 2 days that my insomnia has been brought about by my associating my insomnia with my brain tumour, that my tumour is actually getting better (which is a fact: my last MR head scan 6 months ago showed that it was shrinking and it’s highly unlikely to just suddenly start regrowing again), and that it’s no coincidence that my insomnia happened when I tried to set strict bedtimes. My brain cells are NOT dying. Big mental hurdles to overcome, but I think I’m getting there.
Now when I get a sleep jolt, I try to ignore it and tell myself “it’s just a normal, ordinary sleep jolt, I always get those when I’m feeling really tired.”
I tell myself that I’m fine and the only thing that is preventing me from sleeping is my fear. I tell myself not to worry about sleep. And if I continue to worry, then just let it be and focus on deep breathing.
