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gsdmon – Thanks for getting back to me. It’s really strange the night right after the two acupuncture sessions I had. I am going to continue for a couple more sessions before I decide if I am going to continue. Of course, I might not make my decision to continue on the sleep issue alone but how it makes me feel in other areas of my body. Also, thanks for the tip on the income tax but my insurance does a good job of covering. I only have to pay a $25 co-pay, which is one of the reasons I am trying it. She doesn’t stick any needles in my ear. She uses a massage on the pressure points of the ears. The needles she sticks in the rest of my body.
Nice to see that everybody is getting better, even if slowly. I feel I am slowly improving. I am in a more positive mood and still doing the meditations from the book. I still wake an hour after initially falling asleep and then again at 2:00 in the morning. Sometimes I fall back to sleep or am in and out of sleep until 4:00 or 4:30 but then I usually can’t get back to sleep. This cold I had really set me back. It went into a sinus infection and I had to take antibiotics which had a side effect of causing insomnia in some people, so I made sure I took it in the morning. Then I developed a cough which woke me up at night. I take a codeine cough medicine so I can get some sleep but that has the effect of making me very tired the next day. As an example, I had a good sleep last night but because I took the cough syrup, I am very tired today. That’s why I take it only sporadically. I am going to the neurologist next week. I had to cancel the original appointment because my truck broke down. I can’t say yet that insomnia isn’t affecting my social life but I am certainly better than I was 4 or 5 months ago when I was doing CBT-i with SC. I just know now that this is going to take some time to overcome.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
gsdmom – How long have you been getting acupuncture? I started last week and had my 2nd session yesterday. It’s too early to say if it’s helping yet. After both sessions, I had fitful sleep. It was almost as if half of my body was trying to sleep and the other half was trying to wake up. I hope it lessens some of the anxiety I know I still have.
Pam – So you were staying in bed as much as 10 hours? Of course you were sleeping and not just laying there in quiet wakefulness, right? Even if that goes against the rules in Dr. Meadows book, I suppose as long as you were sleeping and not just laying there it’s okay.
It’s been a rough couple of weeks for me. After getting over the cold I had about a week and a half ago, I started having weird sleeping spells. I would get a decent 6 to 7 hours of sleep one night and then maybe 2 or 3 hours the next night. And then it would repeat itself. I think a couple people on here said they had that happen of good sleep then bad sleep then good sleep then bad. I had a good 6.5 to 7 Monday night and then last night, I got only one hour of sleep which came after my initial falling to sleep. So then I lied awake in bed for 7 hours just letting my mind wander but I never fell asleep, although a little of it was probably Phase 1 sleep. The funny thing about it was when I woke up after that hour, I felt no anxiety or anything. In fact, I was nice and calm and felt really comfortable in bed. That leaves me to believe that anxiety is no longer causing my sleep problem but rather that my arousal system is in bad shape. Are the ACT exercises supposed to help with arousal issues? Has anybody here had the good sleep bad sleep cycle?
BTW, my truck broke down today so I had to cancel the neurology visit and reschedule to early December. But while I waited a long time for that appointment, it doesn’t bother me that much because if the problem is my arousal system, then it isn’t a neurological issue or anything that happened during the surgery.
Mac – You’re missing what ACT is all about. You say “For example going to a person who’s had Insomnia for let’s say 10 years and telling them to just “let go” and practice a few of these acceptance techniques in their head”. It doesn’t work like that and ACT isn’t as simple as you make it out to be. Frankly, that’s probably why you failed at it. It takes a lot of hard work to do those exercises and while Deb may have been helped almost immediately, it has taken gsdmom, Featherly and myself months to reach the point we are at and will probably take more months. But we are better off than when we were under SRT. I can’t imagine cutting two hours off of my SW just to stay up, which means I have to actively do things and waste energy in order not to fall asleep. I am conserving that energy to make it through the next day. I see you ask several people doing ACT, such as gsdmom and Deb, if they have any more techniques that they can give you as the ones they already mentioned apparently didn’t work for you. How long did you practice the techniques they did give you? A week or two? Again, ACT doesn’t work like that. You have to practice and use these techniques for possibly months before you will see some improvement. You need to read Meadows book again. And then read it again! And again! We who practice ACT constantly are referring back to it. In this case, once definitely isn’t enough.
One more thing. You also say “Whatever it takes to increase my sleep confidence so much that any sleep anxiety is buried way way beneath the surface.” I think that’s another point Deb is making that you aren’t understanding. With SRT, you may bury that anxiety for awhile, but it will always be there to rear it’s ugly head. With ACT, you are actually lessening that anxiety, if not making it disappear altogether. I don’t mean for this message to be harsh so forgive me if it comes across that way. But you are totally misunderstanding ACT and therefore not giving it a real chance.
Well, this is my first cold I got while having insomnia and I tell you it is leaving me flat on my back. I usually stay in bed for 8 hours, plus a half hour to an hour on weekends but I have been collapsing in a chair and nodding in and out all weekend. Not sure if it’s affecting my sleep or not. It has sure given me an “I don’t care” attitude which is what I think I need to fight the anxiety.
Delv – I would add watch what you ingest. I just found out today the asthma inhaler I’ve been using can cause insomnia. There is a whole forum from parents who can only give this med to their kids in the morning or afternoon because if they give it to them before bedtime, the kids and some adults who take it are wide awake and become hyper. I’m not sure if this is the problem I have been having lately. It might be preventing me from falling asleep for awhile like I have been doing lately but after a couple hours, you would think it would be out of my system so it doesn’t explain why I can’t get back to sleep three hours after taking it. I am going to try not taking it tonight as the last time I took it was before I left for work. I know another popular drug that can cause insomnia is the steroid Prednisone.
Rough night for me and I think I am regressing some. This is now the third bad night of sleep in a row and I only got 2 and a half hours last night. I lay there for 5 hours calmly and comfortably and accepted it but really feeling crappy again today. The only real problem I had from laying there all night awake was temperature control. It would be too hot so I would throw a blanket off of me and then 10 minutes later I’d have to retrieve it because I was too cold. And on and on it went. If I was asleep, I know that wouldn’t have bothered me. Probably because my body temperature would have been lower due to sleeping and I would have needed the blanket all night. I think I am improving but I really hope I am not in a cycle of having a couple bad nights of sleep and then one or two good nights to make up for it. I did practice the tools all night and welcomed unwelcome thoughts but that was more for practice as I didn’t really have any unwelcome thoughts. I did have a little anxiety but that wasn’t really a factor after I used the tools. No matter how much I let my mind wander, I couldn’t get over that hump and get to sleep. I am accepting though of whatever sleep the weekend brings.
JT – You have a ways to go before you start to feel true acceptance. Keep using the tools and working at it. You won’t be cured in a month or two so remember that. It takes awhile and that’s another fact you have to be accepting of. Feel free to post here anytime even if it’s just to vent. We will support you. Consider us “family”. (What time is Thanksgiving dinner at your place? lol.)
Mac – I have just passed the one year mark of coming down with this. I still remember the first night waking up with it at 2:00 in the morning. I now get between 6 and maybe 7.25 hours of sleep but probably average closer to 6.5. I’m just not sure if it’s good sleep or not. I think that while I feel pretty crappy today, I still have more energy than I did back at the beginning of the year so at least I can get through the day on a really bad day.
Delv – Don’t worry about ranting. That’s what this place is for, among other things. I would keep on doing what you are doing. Eventually, you should get back on track. I know exactly what you mean about sleep logging. I stopped because I became fixated on the exact amounts I was sleeping and awake. It became counter-productive.
Mac – Sorry your sleep went south again. It’s always tough when you introduce something new into your routine even if you did it years ago. But I think you were right to try out going into your bedroom again. For all you know, that’s not even what triggered this latest sleep problem. Hope you get back on track soon.
JT – Have you posted any more video blogs after that initial one we saw? How are you doing? For some reason, I thought I detected an English accent on you which is why I thought you were in England. Yes, I heard about the snowstorm you got. Do consider the advice I gave you yesterday though to take a walk outside and practice the “Noticing Your Senses” tool out there. It really helped me.
I posted a little while ago that I probably got only 5 hours of sleep last night but I either overestimated or the sleep wasn’t very deep. I went over to the Children’s Hospital section of the Hospital where I work to pass out Halloween candy to the kids and I couldn’t believe how light-headed I was. That usually only happens when I get very poor sleep. I guess it’s just tough estimating what kind of sleep you get, even if you might know the approximate amount, until you actually start doing stuff throughout the day.
Deb – Glad to hear you are back on track again. It doesn’t seem to take you long to get back on track for the several times you relapsed. That’s good to know. While I do average about 6.5 hours a night (last night was a relapse and only had about 5.0 but that’s life) I really do need more. I suspect I will start picking up more after my appointment with the neurologist in two weeks. Either she is going to find something or she is not and either way, that will tell me something and I won’t be sitting thinking about all of the horrible possibilities. I meditate to try to get my mind off of it but it’s really difficult. But at least I am getting what I am getting instead of what I used to get. It has been about one year now since I came down with insomnia. I will never forget that night I suddenly woke up at 2:00am and couldn’t get back to sleep. My life changed forever at that point. Even when I get “cured”, I will always remember the dark times and know that they might come back.
Anyway, Happy Halloween everyone!
Hi gsdmom. Congratulations on going back to work again. To answer your question, I don’t have much of that light sleep anymore….at least not that I know of. My problem mainly now is waking up about an hour after I first fall asleep and then early awakenings at around 3 or 4 in the morning. I actually feel pretty good energy wise though. I still suffer from dry eye syndrome and part of this is from the insomnia but also I think a big part of it is from air blowing from the CPAP machine. I still get the increased headaches the more sleep I get so I am going to the neurologist for that but as I said, as for my energy level, that is pretty good although not what it was pre-insomnia. As you said, it’s a slow process of retraining the brain. Good luck to you with your new job.
My interpretation of that with ACT is that you can certainly get confidence in your ability to sleep and that your body certainly hasn’t lost that ability, just don’t start predicting that “this is the night I’m going to sleep”. Accept whatever comes.
By the way, are you in England? You’re getting snow now? Just curious. In order to distract your mind from your insomnia, dress warm and take a walk outside using the Noticing Your Senses tool. Good luck to you.
JT, you are committing a very bad error. Going to bed with optimism is actually an unwanted thought. (Dr. Kat from Dr. Meadows sleep school confirmed this with one of the people here who talked to her online.) Continue to go to bed with the idea of accepting whatever happens. That is what acceptance of insomnia is all about. Going to bed thinking you are going to sleep could be very disappointing if it doesn’t happen. When the optimism shows up, just note the thought and then go back to what you were doing, which was probably lying in bed accepting whatever happens. There are so many pitfalls in ACT, I know. But when you don’t have expectations, you won’t be disappointed and you can prepare yourself better for acceptance.
