There are many different types of insomnia, there’s difficulty falling asleep, there’s difficulty staying asleep, there’s medical reasons, there’s sleep apnea (difficulty breathing during the night – which is really medical too), there’s snoring (not you – your partner) among others.
But there’s got to be a few methods for breaking through the non-medical issues behind not sleeping.
In this post, I’ll talk about a method that has worked for me. It may be difficult to maintain – but that’s part of the beauty. Once it starts to work, you can slowly get back to a more normal sleep pattern.
You need to start at the beginning, and there are some easy-to-implement steps you can take to see if they, by themselves or in some kind of combination, can resolve the “no sleep” issue for you. Primarily, it involves some fairly rigid sleep habits, called “sleep hygiene”, that tend to cover all the basic stuff any doctor or sleep lab would ask you about if you were to go see them. Make sure these are all covered first before we start on the “stubborn insomnia” path.
What we’re talking about here is sleeplessness that’s more stubborn than the more conventional, easy to implement, treatments can cure. It involves a little sacrifice on your part, but it doesn’t involve medication (holistic, herbal or conventional) of any kind and it isn’t dangerous.
- Stay up much later than usual. This is likely to be 1am or 2am in the morning. Make sure it’s a minimum of 5 hours before you’re supposed to be up and out of bed.
- Remain with the fixed, early wake up time you have from your basic sleep hygiene. This will likely be 6 or 7 in the morning, so you should be drastically cutting the time you’re spending in bed. Remember – bed is only for sleeping or sex (see basic hygiene).
- Repeat this every night for two weeks. Go to bed late, and wake up early. Weekends included. No cheating. If you cheat, you defeat the whole purpose here.
- When you are sleeping completely between the time you go to bed and the time you wake up (after the two weeks), start to increase the amount of time in bed by 15 minutes. Do this for a few days, and if you’re still sleeping through the night, do it again (so, if you were initially going to bed at 1am for the 2 week period, make it 12:45am for a few days – then if successful, make it 12:30am and so on).
- There will come a time when you’ve moved your bedtime back until your either not sleeping through the night again (in which case add another 15 minutes to the time you’re awake), or you’ve arrived at a good time for you (6 or 7 or 8 hours – note that more than 8 hours is probably self-defeating). This is around the new bedtime for you, and this should now be considered the new “normal”.
What we’re really trying to do here is to increase a thing called “sleep pressure”. This pressure is in all of us, and it increases during the day calling us to sleep at night. The longer we’re awake – the more the pressure. We’re trying to build up so much pressure that you’re body’s reaction is that is has to go to sleep. Once we’ve built up that sleep association, we can start to fine-tune it to find a new bedtime. The whole process shouldn’t take more than a month.
Try it – I did and it worked for me!
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