I
had barely been an insomniac a month before I heard about one of the
more effective techniques used in treating it: sleep restriction. With
this strategy, you give yourself a "sleep window," a limited set of
hours during which you're allowed to be in bed—typically about the same
number of hours as you're actually sleeping, on average. With this
restrictive window, you're more likely to actually be sleepy when you go
to bed and thus more likely to actually fall asleep, and your sleep
time is compressed, which generally means it's going to be higher
quality with fewer mid-night awakenings.
Sleep
restriction is just one of a whole suite of techniques for overcoming
insomnia, known collectively as cognitive-behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBT-i.
I decided to
try it for myself, choosing a sleep window between 2am and 7:30am on
April 20th. Trying to keep myself up until 2 felt like the hardest task I ever set myself to! To keep myself occupied, I watched the 1997 version of
Cinderella on Disney+, and – I'm sorry Brandy – but you will be forever
associated with that traumatic night. All for nothing, too, because
since I was doing it on my own with limited knowledge and no support, I
failed miserably. I only tried sleep restriction 5 days, never once
actually making it to my target bedtime, before I gave up.
I
decided that if I was going to do CBT for my insomnia, I was going to
have to do it with the assistance of a professional. The psychiatrists I
saw never even suggested therapy as an option, and I was reluctant to
seek out a therapist on my own while I was still receiving treatment. I
was also still hoping against hope that my insomnia would resolve
itself, as I still hadn't hit the magical three-month mark at which
insomnia officially becomes "chronic."
On
June 7, I hit that mark. Three days later, the day my second dose of Lunesta utterly failed me, I acknowledged that this brand of treatment
was a waste of my time, and if I was going to get serious about fixing
my sleep, I was going to have to start therapy. However, given what I
knew about the availability of real-time therapists, and the
inevitability of their costs, I decided to try a free option first: a
2-week email sleep training course, taught by none other than Martin
Reed, the mystical Insomnia Coach from last post! I had become a huge
fan of his Sleep Snippets videos and found lots of useful information in
the forums on his website, so I figured I'd give his sleep training a
try before forking over any big bucks.
Spoiler
alert: It changed my life!
The
sleep training consisted of reading an email a day with behavioral
tips, mindfulness tips, and information about how sleep works. Each day
there was a question that I was expected to send in an answer to.
Occasionally Martin even wrote back with personal replies! In the second
week, the rubber met the road, as I was instructed on how to properly implement sleep restriction.
In
the course of the two weeks, I didn't really start sleeping any better, but I gained a ton of confidence about my ability to sleep. I
no longer felt like a prisoner of my insomnia. And even though I was barely sleeping any more than I had been, I felt 10 times happier and better rested
during the day, simply because I had gained knowledge and skills and no longer lived in a constant state of despair.
After
months of waiting, the Sandman had finally entered the building. But he
wasn't about to sprinkle me with magical sleeping dust just yet! I was
going to have to work for it.
In a future post, you'll hear exactly what that work looked like.
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