Early bird to night owl...and back again?

 

Early to bed and early to rise—that's been my philosophy ever since I was able to set my own sleep schedule. One of my boyfriends once called me "solar powered," because I always rose just after dawn and felt my energy start to wane as soon as sunset approached. To me, mornings are the best part of the day, and nights are only good for one thing: sleeping!

So for me, one of the worst parts of insomnia is that I'm forced to be awake during the night—when, even if I'm not sleepy in the slightest, I still have absolutely no motivation to do anything. Time awake at night is time completely wasted.

And yet, as I mentioned in my last post, a huge part of my treatment plan for insomnia involved deliberately staying up until very late at night in a technique called sleep restriction. It was one of the least enjoyable experiences I ever put myself through.

To implement sleep restriction properly, I had to set a "sleep window" during which I was allowed to be in bed. This sleep window was supposed to equal the approximate number of hours of sleep I averaged every night, plus 30 minutes for falling asleep—but never shorter than about 5.5 hours, because I wasn't supposed to deprive myself of too much sleep, should it miraculously occur. The sleep window was supposed to start and end at the same time every night, so that it could be the basis for a solid circadian rhythm. The start time was also known as my "earliest in-bed time." I was allowed to go to bed later than that if I wasn't sleepy yet, but was not allowed to go to bed earlier. The end time was my "latest out-of-bed time," because I was allowed to get up earlier if I was ready, but never supposed to sleep in past it.

The out-of-bed-time is the most important part of the sleep window, because getting up at the same time every day is the best way to set your internal clock and help you sleep at night. When I started this process, it was the height of summer, and the sun was rising shortly after 5am every day. Being solar powered, I would have preferred to set my wake-up time to around then, but there was a confounding factor: my social life.

It was a Hot Vax Summer, and I was taking every opportunity to go to concerts and other late-night activities. I was also dating this guy who happened to be a night owl. I wanted to align my sleep schedule more closely with his so we could have more quality time together, so I opted for a later end time of 7:30. I knew that on the nights I wasn't going out, I'd probably be able to wake up closer to 6:30, but that extra hour gave me a little cushion so I would still get a modicum of sleep on the nights I wanted to have fun.

The week I started my sleep training, I was averaging 4.3 hours of sleep a night, which meant I should set my sleep window to the minimum recommended time of 5.5 hours. Counting back from 7:30, that meant my bedtime would have be be no earlier than 2AM. Two A.M.! Every night! This early bird just about had a hairy canary before deciding 1:30 was good enough. If the sun was usually going to wake me up before 7, that made for a solid 5.5-hour sleep window most days. If a few days, I were to sleep an extra half-hour, it probably wouldn't ruin me.

What did seem to nearly ruin me, however, was actually staying awake. For someone who could easily lie sleepless in bed until dawn, I had a surprisingly difficult time staying up until 1:30.

A lot of people with long-term insomnia experience disruption to their internal clocks, and some claim to never get sleepy at all. I was (un)fortunate enough to have my prior circadian rhythms stay mostly intact, which meant that every night, like clockwork, I would start to feel extremely tired around 10 PM. Like eyes-refusing-to-open-staggering-around-the-house tired. You'd think being so tired would mean I'd sleep like a baby, but with insomnia, that is usually not the case, so it was vital that I power through the sleepiness and stick with the plan. I still had 3 and a half hours left until my sleep window, so I had to devise all sorts of techniques to keep me from crawling into bed early.

I began doing all my exercise late in the evening, just to keep me busy. I would wait until 11 pm and take my dog for a walk (fortunately we have a light-up leash that was practically made for this moment!). I would get home and do yoga at 12. Sometimes I would just pace the kitchen until bedtime approached. Occasionally a friend would call, and we'd have lengthy conversations that kept my mind off my tiredness. But often I would often get so exhausted that all I could do was sit on the couch and stare into space. At these times, I often accidentally nodded off for a few minutes.

And then, finally, the sleep window would open! I would drag myself into bed...and suddenly find myself wide awake, panicked again that I wasn't falling asleep!

One of the essential rules for recovering from insomnia is that you should never stay in bed when you are unable to sleep (I think I'll do a whole post on that topic, so hang on and find out why later), so at this point, I'd be obligated to get back out of bed. I'd return to the couch, sitting with that familiar dizzy, discombobulated, burning-eyed feeling that I get when my brain won't let my body sleep, until finally I felt calm enough to go back to bed for another try.

With results like that, was sleep restriction actually good for anything? Well, it's hard to say because it wasn't the only CBTi technique I was trying, but over the course of a few weeks, I did start to sleep longer on average. There were two things that sleep restriction definitely accomplished for me: 1 is that it helped me recognize what true (extreme) sleepiness feels like, so I could know what's an appropriate time to go to bed (hint: not when I'm just lazy and bored and tired of being awake!). 2 is that it helped me internalize the idea that you don't need to hop into bed as soon as your usual bedtime arrives. If you stay up later because you're not tired, it's totally fine—as long as you wake up at the same time in the morning to anchor your circadian cycle.

Over time, the sleepless portions of my night got smaller and smaller. When I was sleeping at least 85% of the time I was in bed, I was allowed to extend my sleep window. In early July, I pushed my bedtime up to 1:15, then two weeks later, 1:00. Only a few days after that, I pushed it again to 12:15 and then to midnight. By early August, I felt like I was making so much progress, that I stopped enforcing a bedtime, and just focused on waiting until I was sleepy and not really worrying too much about the clock. Nowadays, my bedtime seems to have stabilized at around 11 PM—more or less what it was before my insomnia started.

But if I'm being honest with myself, I have to say that I still want to do better!

During those early days of sleep restriction, I came to appreciate just how much I value the sunshine. I deeply regretted that I was missing out on an hour or more of perfectly good daylight by waking up so late, and I hated that I was spending so many of my waking hours in the pitch dark, just counting down the minutes until I could crawl into bed.

Unfortunately for me, my late-sleeping love interest didn't stay in my life very long—and as soon as we stopped hanging out regularly, I shifted my wake-up time to 7AM. Just today, I decided there was no good reason not to push it to 6:50. I am inching slowly towards the goal that partially set me on my path to insomnia in the first place—being able to wake up with the sun!

When I first started my sleep training, I was asked what my goals were. I said something about wanting to get enough sleep that I wouldn't feel like a zombie all day. To my surprise, I accomplished that very early in the training, so my goals quickly shifted: Now I want nothing more than to be able to wake up as soon as it's light and to sleep when it's dark. After having been a reluctant night owl for several months, I believe more confidently than ever that the mornings are the best part of the day and the nights are good for nothing but sleep! I never want to waste another hour of precious sunlight again! 

My old alarm clock / future self!