Insomnia Support Group
Insomnia is a symptom, rather than a disease, and is characterized by inadequate quantity or quality of sleep. People with insomnia complain of difficulty falling or staying asleep, which results in significant impairment of daytime functioning. Insomnia is categorized as transient (shorter than one week), short-term (one to three weeks) or chronic (longer than three...
I'm just so glad I figured out this sleep mess. To be honest lifes not perfect including the amount of sleep I'm getting. As a person I have so much more to grow and get better in but I'm proud of the strides I've made. My GPA is on the rise( 3.6 GPA currently), I'm scheduled to graduate with a bachelors degree next summer and I'll only be 22 so I'll be relatively young still, and I'm developing good connections for my future professional career. For me I think that I've got the Education, Connections, and some experience but I'm lacking the technical skills to be successful in a career. But I'm trying to get better and I fill like I've got the tools and just need a few parts. It might take a few years to get where I really want but now I'm not scared anymore. Finally I'm not feeling like I'm trying to survive and feel like I'm actually living life. So yes I'm not a perfect person but now I at least feel like I'm moving in the right direction.
Now just think about this ... what did all that worry and anxiety about sleep actually accomplish? I mean you're doing well despite sleeping crappy in the past. You've proved you're going to be OK.
I know this is all a learning experience, as it is for us all, but I hope going forward in the future you will see it's not only OK to let go some of the worry and anxiety, you'll actually help yourself a lot.
First I'll start with you Hypnos. I'm about to go much more in depth about it below but I believe there's one primary reason why each of us sleep bad on this forum. The rest of it's secondary causes(which you can usually get away with if the primary cause is addressed). I will say that my worry and anxiety went away BUT it's because I addressed the primary issue. The anxiety wouldn't haven't gone away(at least permanently) if I hadn't addressed the primary cause of my poor sleep. You can only cope with things for so long; ultimately you have to get results. I'm going to compare insomnia to an unhappy marriage(although I have no experience with one). You can do all the coping in the world but if you're living in the same home as your spouse in an unhappy marriage, you're never going to be happy unless one of two things happen. Either you resolve issues so it turns into a good marriage again, or you move out and move on and start a new chapter of your life.
For insomnia, I think you have to get your situation for horrible to Okay. Before I'd say my situation was an F and now it's a C+. It's not perfect by any means but I'm working on getting it even better. The main point is that once your situation is okay, you can't be content; you have to run with it. Once I got to be okay I started commenting more in class, and I've actually made a lot of friends or at the very least(acquaintances). I've been able to participate in leisure more. In conjunction with sleeping better and more, starting to work out again, hang out with friends more, and start dating will be of my "run with it" situations.
Now on to Sadie. It's not a simple answer Sadie but I'll do my best explain. Ultimately the number one thing you have to do is get OFFENSIVE with tackling your insomnia, not DEFENSIVE. It's important to have defensive skills for insomnia but think about it as a sports analagy. In NBA basketball, lets says your team lost a game 80 to 70. Both scores are very low for a professional basketball game. After losing the game, it wouldn't make sense for the team that score 70 points to be talking about how they could have won the game by playing better defense. It's not realistic to hold a professional basketball team under 80 points, but it's awful to only score 70 points in a game; you're discussion would have been about what could have we have done better offensively? So what on earthing am I referring to as Offense in an insomnia problem?
I define offense in insomnia as performing an action that controls the primary cause of your poor sleep. For me, I tryed a bunch of things and found out that sleeping to much was the primary reason for the extent of poor sleep quality that I was receiving. So my OFFENSIVE move was to Sleep less.
So what is defense in an insomnia problem? I define defense in insomnia as performing actions that control secondary causes of your poor sleep. Examples include exercising, socializing, taking medication, not using electronics at night, taking a hot bath before bed, other good sleep habits we've all heard about, and coping with a poor nights sleep.
No amount of coping(I.E trying to stay postive) is going to work if you don't tackle the real problem. You can only cope and be positive for so long without getting results. After all, the whole reason you're having to cope in the first place is because you're struggling with sleeping. Now It's still important to possess defensive skills/habits because in life things happen. Sometimes we work till the afternoon and are up till 1 or 2 doing homework and have to wake up the next day at 6 so you're going to be exhausted that day. Things just happen in life. But you can usually get away with not doing or doing(depending the action/situation) the secondary causes of your poor sleep and still sleep well as long as the primary cause of your poor sleep has been addressed.
The primary causes and secondary causes on insomnia are going to be different for every person but at least from what I've figured out, there's one main reason why I was sleeping poorly, and once I fixed that, my sleeping situation dramatically improved.