If you love your bed, (don't) let it go

A typical pre-insomnia workday

The hardest part about getting over insomnia (yes, I say every part was the hardest part!) was divesting from my bed.

As I mentioned in "Bye, Bye, Beddie," a good portion of my pre-insomnia leisure and relaxation time was spent in my bed. But the rules of stimulus control are clear: your bed should only be used for sleep (and, as they almost always tack onto the end, sex). So I stopped using my bed as a hangout spot.

You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone, and as soon as I stopped using my bed for recreation, I realized how much I had loved it. And how much I missed it!

When I would pass my bedroom during the day and glance inside, just the sight of the bed filled me with longing. Not a longing for sleep, but merely for a comfortable place to lie down.

Though I tried to replace the bed with a yoga mat, it was kind of like trying to replace ice cream with non-dairy frozen dessert—disappointing! A yoga mat is a poor substitute for a cushy (or even medium-firm, as I prefer it) mattress, and the necessity of unrolling the yoga mat every time I wanted to relax took a lot of enjoyment out of it.

The living room couch was a much softer option, but it wasn't big enough for me to chill out in one of my favorite positions—on my stomach with a game or book in front of me. I wasn't able to chill out at all when DC's famous July heat and humidity hit full force, and the only comfortable room in the house was my bedroom with its window air conditioner. The bedroom was also a place of blessed privacy—whereas in the living room, I always felt like I was on public display.

On some days when the yearning for my bed grew to be too much, I would rebelliously grab my iPad and try to take my lunch break there like the old days. But the guilt about breaking the rules always ruined it for me. I'd start to wonder whether I was sabotaging my sleep, then I'd get nervous and lose my appetite, and eventually I just gave up, abandoning my guilty pleasure and returning to an approved daytime venue.

I constantly debated with myself about whether this sacrifice was really necessary. On the one hand, I'd spent years flopping into bed whenever the mood struck, with nary a negative consequence (though it could be one reason I was never a great sleeper). I'd spent the past year+ spending almost all my down time in bed without it having any measurable impact on my sleep.

But rules are rules. The sleep experts wouldn't tell me not to do it if there weren't a good reason! Or would they?

When justification for this rule was given, it was always that you want to make your bed a subconscious trigger for sleep. If you're always doing other things in your bed, then you weaken that association.

But the rule almost always makes a clear exception for sex, and if you can make an exception for one activity, then why not make exceptions for others? How much harm would it really do, if I were to lie on top of my bed doing non-stressful activities like reading and eating? Would that innocuous behavior really jeopardize my sleep that much? Has this been quantified anywhere?

I looked it up. Although I could find plenty of evidence that stimulus control therapy does help people improve their sleep, it was unclear how much, if at all, the one behavior – avoiding the bed during the day – really contributed to the overall success, as it was seemingly never evaluated separately from other behaviors—such as leaving the bed when you're having trouble sleeping at night.

My personal suspicion was that it wouldn't make much difference. I even made a list of reasons why my patterns of recreation in bed would have minimal impact on its sleep-stimulus effect:

1. I almost always do activities in the bed in a face-down position, but when I am sleeping in the bed, I lie on my back or side.
2. I do activities on top of the covers, but I sleep underneath them.
3. I don't use pillows when doing activities in the bed, but I do when I'm sleeping.
4. When I do activities in the bed, it is sunny out or the lights are on. When I sleep, I sleep in darkness.
5. When I do activities in the bed, I always have objects to interact with (food, books, tablet). When I sleep, these are absent.

Solid reasons, sure, but all the logic in the world couldn't hold a candle to my paranoia. I didn't want to take a chance on being wrong and ruining my sleep because of it.

 

 

So I set up a bed-beside-the-bed. I folded a comforter into fourths and placed it on top of a spare yoga mat, and rolled it up for storage. When I wanted to lie down during the day, I'd unroll it onto the floor, throw down some pillows, and left it out to use whenever I felt like it that day—reading, gaming, and eating to my heart's content, secure in the knowledge that no rules were being broken.

Problem solved! But not for very long. After I'd been using my "insomnia bed" for a couple months, I began to feel discontent again. Sure, it was an improvement over the couch and the yoga mat, but it still wasn't the ideal hangout spot. It was still more rigid than a mattress, and when I lay on my belly, my splayed elbows were always contacting hard objects like the flooring and furniture. Plus, my dog, who believes that everything on the floor belongs to him, missed no opportunity to steal my food whenever I left it near this ersatz bed. When he wasn't slobbering into my water cup, he was tracking dirt all over the bedroll itself; being on the ground, it was always gritty and festooned with dust bunnies. And the final (perhaps most weighty) fact remained: there's something deeply gratifying about being able to throw yourself dramatically onto a bed and instantly relax—something that cannot be replicated when you first have to unroll the bed, arrange some pillows, and then gingerly lower yourself into the narrow space between your real bed and the cedar chest.

I missed my real bed so much! I had to put in a lot of work to overcome insomnia, but most of it made me feel good that it was helping me progress. Giving up the bed was the only part of it that actually made me sad!

In September, when I had worked myself up to at least 6 hours of sleep most nights, I began experimenting with using the real bed for activities other than sleep (or even sex!). I figured if I were facing a different direction, the conditions would be so different from the conditions for sleep, that they wouldn't interfere. I eased into it slowly, starting by lying on the bed crosswise and setting my books and entertainment on the bedside table so I wouldn't see any part of the bed. Then, I graduated to a diagonal position, facing the corner of the bed on the the side opposite where I usually sleep. This abundance of caution may sound excessive – even superstitious – to someone who has never had insomnia, but I was truly afraid to break the rules, because I didn't want to risk triggering a relapse.

Then on September 25, while researching material for this blog, I stumbled across the truth that finally set me free!

Daytime bed avoidance is a key part of of stimulus control therapy for insomnia, but it is also an element of sleep hygiene. While most insomnia experts admit that sleep hygiene is known to be ineffective in curing insomnia, I only know of one to claim that "sleep hygiene is %@$&*" and that it "makes insomnia worse!" That particular expert is Joseph Pannell.

In his video, "10 evidence - based techniques to treat Insomnia..." he cautions the viewer against making "sleep efforts," because, as we now well know, the harder you try to sleep, the harder you make it to sleep. He specifically mentions "avoidance sleep efforts," which are the things you avoid doing because they could negatively affect your sleep. Avoiding some things sometime, like caffeine and alcohol, is all well and good, but Joseph's point seems to be (and I'm paraphrasing a lot here!) that if your fear of sleep disruption leads you to constantly avoid things that make you happy, then you're reinforcing the control that insomnia has over your life.

Or, to quote his video, "Whilst these things can impact your sleep...treating your sleep like it's something fragile just causes you to obsess and worry about sleep more, and it causes you to limit your life...and take your feeling of control and agency over it. So the best way to...get that agency back...is if you've got something you enjoy and you love to do, teach your brain that insomnia is not a threat....Go and do it anyway."

To me, that was a clarion call to dive headfirst into my bed and do things! Not just sleeping and sex, but any darn thing that happens to bring me joy! My weeks of sorrowful abstinence had made it clear that using my bed as a spot for daytime relaxation does bring me joy. It's possible that doing so could slightly weaken the association between the bed and sleep, but I have an indomitable sleep drive, and this one little habit was not going to make or break it. And so I returned to unrestricted bed use.

I can't recommend that everyone follow my lead and completely disregard any rule of sleep hygiene or CBTi as they see fit. After all, I'd been playing by the book for over 3 months (longer than I'd had insomnia before starting CBTi!) before making this change. So the therapy had had plenty of opportunity to do its magic.

But for me, it was time. Once you become an expert in the rules, that's when you can start to break the rules—and I think I have reached the point where I am an expert in sleep. To me, returning to this beloved pre-insomnia habit was one of the best (and most delightful) indicators that I'd finally gotten a handle on my sleep.

I'd always loved being in bed. Now, without the fear of insomnia getting in the way, I was finally able to follow my heart and treat my bed, not like some sacred relic, but like a good friend.