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Mac – how’s it going?
Dragon – how’s it going? Are you sticking with it. I know it can be hard when you first start.
Had my best week so far with 6 nights of 6.5 hours of sleep and 1 night with 4.5. Today starts my final week with Martin. Feeling optimistic but not completely confident. I either fall asleep right away from complete exhaustion or stay awake too long. Wish I knew how to shorten the time lying in bed before falling asleep. Don’t want to always depend of absolute exhaustion in order to fall asleep. It was never like that before. I typically took 20-30 minutes to fall asleep, but never worried because I always knew I would eventually fall asleep. Now when I don’t fall asleep right away, the sleep demons creep back in.
Hi BishBosh,
How are you doing? You wrote here that you’ve been feeling hopelessness and suicidal. Not good. But very understandable. I was like y0u before in both mood and extreme frustration over not being able to fall asleep. I could be totally exhausted yet would just lie in bed for hours unable to sleep. When it was at its worse, sometimes I wouldn’t sleep all night or maybe would finally fall asleep at 5 or 6 am for a few hours. I went 9 days once with 4 of them without any sleep at all and the rest with only a few hours of sleep. I was ready to be put in the mental hospital!
I know that you said you went to a CBT-I clinic, but it sounds like you didn’t get the help you needed. In that case, you need to keep looking for the right help. People sometimes have to go to several doctors before they finally find the right one who gives them the correct diagnosis and treatment for a medical condition. So it seems that you need to keep trying to find the right help for you and not give up.
I started working with Martin 6 weeks ago and my sleep has improved tremendously. I have actually slept all night, 4 nights in a row as of last night. I want to encourage you to email Martin and see if he can help you like he’s helped me. Tell him exactly what you’ve tried as well as what you are doing now. And then ask him if he thinks he could help you. He’s very good at responding promptly to emails, so you would hear back from him soon.
Whatever you do, don’t give up! There is help out there for you. You can also follow the thread “Sudden Severe Insomnia” as some of us are posting our journey of implementing insomnia therapy and are sharing our progress as well as our struggles. This should give you some hope. I would also recommend you read Sasha Stephens’s book, The Effortless Sleep Method, if you haven’t already. She talks about her insomnia of 15 years and how she over came it.
Take care.
Good luck! It works. I’ve had 4 good nights of sleep now, straight in a row.
Keep us posted so we can cheer you on!
Dragon – I recommend you give it your all for 2 weeks. Otherwise it might be too short a period to see results. Let us know how you’re doing and we’ll encourage you along the way.
Hey Everyone – I just noticed a really nice video of Martin on one of the threads. Check it out. He’s interviewed by a sleep physician who appears to have a great series of videos on insomnia on YouTube. Looks like a great resource.
I liken insomnia to an out-of-control child. The child screams and demands that he get his way, and all the while he’s just making himself more and more miserable as well as everyone else around him. But inside he’s crying out for limits and structure, but is too young to know any better. Our insomnia also screams at us, “Take a pill!” “Drink some booze!” “Don’t sleep in your bed, only the couch!” “Take a nap!” “Turn that TV back on or you’ll never sleep!” It’s desperate for sleep but is only making us more miserable because it doesn’t know what else to do. But more than anything, it needs limits and structure.
Dragon, I know about that anxiety. In the worst throes of my insomnia even apocalyptic exhaustion after not sleeping at all the previous night and maybe only 3 hours the night before, after taking 2 or 3 sleeping pills and downing 2 white Russians, this was still not enough to get me to sleep. At that point I just wanted someone to hit me over the head and knock me out!
There’s something about the consistent sleep window that really helps. It’s like your body and mind recognize that you’ve finally got a plan and it begins to relax into the security of it.
Just warning you again, Dragon, that this will not be easy. I hired Martin because I read that this method was difficult to implement and that it was a good idea to get the support of a therapist/coach who has experience in this area. Martin helps to keep me accountable and also is there whenever I have questions, am frustrated, need to vent, etc. Also, it helped me a lot to know that there was someone who’s got my back (those on the forum do too.)
Going from your present sleep window to 6 hours will not be easy and you will find yourself fighting the urge to sleep in the last hour or more before 12:00. But in the early stages, the utter exhaustion is what it takes to override the anxiety. Every night my husband’s bedtime is 10:30 to 11:00 and I always watch with envy his going to bed while I’m sitting in the living room, fighting to keep myself awake. Fortunately, over time I got used to this schedule. My goal is to eventually go to sleep at the same time as him.
Anyway, the point is that it’s going to be hard, especially in the beginning, so you have to keep your eye on your goal. Watch for any improvement because this will give you hope to keep going. But it may not happen immediately. Sometimes things may even get worse before they get better. To do this work takes commitment and determination. As you may have read, Mac struggled with this for 2 years and finally got so sick and tired of the insomnia that she finally got to the point of total commitment and no return. That’s what it takes to do this because it’s so hard. It will get easier though, especially when you realize that you’re sleep is getting more consistent and you’re feeling less anxious and more confident. You’ll realize that hard work was worth it.
During those first few weeks of 6 hours, I was tired most of the time, because 6 hours really isn’t enough sleep for me. As I said, it was the bare minimum. But I was ok with it because I could see that my sleep was beginning to stabilize which was more important. So just warning you that you will be tired. But keep your eyes on the long term goal of being completely cured of this.
When I was in my worst phase of insomnia and didn’t know anything about sleep restriction (SR) I continued to get up all night, sometimes finally falling asleep at 5 or 6 in the morning. If I was lucky and didn’t have be somewhere or do something in the morning, I could sleep until 9 or 10. Actually, I should say unlucky, because this created bad habits of sleeping all different hours. I actually felt like I was training myself to be up all night! After I went on sleep restriction and had to get up at 6:00 it was really hard knowing I had to get up in just a couple hours or so. But on the other hand, something interesting happened. After getting up maybe 2 or 3 times and it was now 3:00 a.m. or so, I would go back to bed and just give up the fight and decide to stay in bed. Then I would eventually fall asleep. So there was something psychological about knowing I had to get up at a certain time. So make sure you do the sleep restriction along with the SC (stimulus control – getting up out of bed.) And make your sleep window the bare minimum amount of sleep that you need. That will ensure that you’re really tired when you go to bed. Once your sleep starts to stabilize, then you can increase it gradually. I was on 6 hours for the first 3 weeks and now am up to 6.5 hours.
Glad you’re recovering from your illness. So far I’ve been spared from the flu this year (knock on wood.) Hope you get back on track with your sleep and things will improve for you.
By the way, I read the book, Desperately Seeking Snoozing, by John Wiedman. He cured his insomnia of 10 years with the same method. So this program works.
What works is just the consistency of going to bed at the same time each night and getting up at the same time. I go to bed at 12:00 and get up at 6:30. I think over time I’m feeling less anxious and more confident, even though last week was rough. So I think that’s helping with me falling asleep more quickly. Also, keeping my sleep window at 6.5 hours is ensuring that I’m tired at midnight. Last night for the first time in in a long time I wasn’t very tired at 11:00. I wondered if I might have to stay up a little later to become sleepy. But by the time 12:00 rolled around I was very ready for bed.
Yes having those bad nights really takes a hit to our confidence. But all we can do is to get up on that horse again (or the bed) and keep going, and over time our optimism and confidence will continue to grow.
Last night Martin showed me some graphs of former clients who had a similar pattern as mine, with a dip around the 5th or 6th week. After that the graphs went up again. Some of them reported their progress later and it still took another month or two to reach their ideal sleep goal. So we gotta keep going!
Have had three nights in a row of a full night of sleep. This morning wasn’t even tempted to lay in bed awhile longer after the alarm went off because I was so rested. This program works! I think I took a dip last week but now I’m back on track.
