LogFAQs > #932194031

First, I'm gonna quote some stuff I said in a different topic since it's pretty related, but not all of it may apply to you.

WhiteLens posted...
if it's about racing thoughts, there are 2 things you can do. There's the mindfulness approach, where you just accept the thoughts that come in and don't react to them. You can't control what thoughts pop-up, but you can control how to react to them. It's best to acknowledge that thoughts are just thoughts, that they'll come and go if you let them do so without reacting to them. Trying to push thoughts away can lead to the thoughts coming back even stronger.

The other approach is to get out of bed when you can't sleep, and do something that'll calm you down. This is particularly a good idea when your mind is really anxious because you don't want your body to associate your bed with anxiety and frustration. Just do something relaxing until you're sleepy or relaxed enough to go back to bed. What you do can really be anything, just keep in mind that the goal is to get you to relax, not fall asleep. Doing anything with the intention of getting you to sleep does the opposite and keeps you awake.

Last piece of advice is to get up and out of bed at the same time. The only thing that really dictates you going to sleep is your own sleep drive, and the only thing that'll raise your sleep drive is being awake. Thus getting up at the same time gives you an anchor to start building your sleep drive. Ideally you should be going to bed at the same time, but you really only want to be going to bed when you're sleepy.

Biggest thing to remember is that you can't force sleep to happen, and "trying" to sleep often does the opposite, keeping you awake. It's something that happens on its own, and good sleepers don't think anything about their sleep.

Next, these have been my go to YouTube channels for dealing with insomnia

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_tdQDMQon0CfD0xAbZPNDg/videos
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL5LsLUeVA2j_Vsl5625shQ/videos

They have a lot of videos, but it's mostly their early videos that explain CBTi. Most of their other videos is just them addressing common worries about insomnia, and sometimes they're repeating themselves. They're good to watch if you have some of those same worries.

The nice thing about Daniel Erichsen, the guy in the first link, is that if you email him or leave a comment in any of his videos, he may respond in a new video with some advice for you.

This is a new channel that I discovered fairly recently:

https://www.youtube.com/user/steveorma/videos

I'm actually familiar with the guy running it, I think it provides a good overview of the problems that caused insomnia and how to deal with it.

There's also a chance that your local library has books on how to treat insomnia. You just have to make sure that it's a book about dealing with insomnia specifically, and not books on sleep in general. Because reading about all the negative effects from the lack of sleep when you're already having trouble with sleep is only gonna cause more anxiety and make sleep harder to get. (The famous book, Why We Sleep, is probably the biggest perpetrator for this)

Something to keep in mind is that it can take awhile to see any effects, after all you're trying to reverse something you had for a decade. It does take a lot of persistent and consistent effort to get through it. None the less, I do hope you get past your insomnia.

---

http://www.backloggery.com/whitelens | https://myanimelist.net/profile/WhiteLens
F/GO: 271551102; FFRK: 9k6d; FFBE: 886783216