The last few days I’m reading more and more messages/blogs/articles from people that are complaining of not getting enough sleep or having insomnia, this brought back the memories from when I was suffering form sleep deprivation.
Yesterday someone mentioned it again and I wanted to react, maybe give some advise, but I quickly realized that in this case 140 characters just would not cut it, so I started on my first 140+ blog post, but when I was half way I came to the conclusion that it could be a good post for my normal blog as well, so after some cut and paste here it is:
Before you ask no I’m not searching them (the insomnia stories) out, they just seem to pop up everywhere they previously where not.
My story and solution:
A few years ago I was experiencing a lot of stress and finally it was keeping me up all night.
I took me 4 to 6 weeks of not sleeping or less than 10 minutes a day, to use up all my reserves and forced me to talk to a shrink so I could get some help in surviving the sleepless 24 hours a day.
This was also the moment I learned that not sleeping for several weeks is actually dangerous for your physical health, besides harm done to it by not paying enough attention in an risky situation like cutting yourself when peeling potatoes, it turns out sleep deprivation for a prolonged period can damage your body severely.
Despite me being totally anti (prescription) drugs at that time, I had to cave in and started treatment with some pills to let me go to sleep and some to keep the stress/fear levels at daytime manageable. The latter worked fine.
As it turns my autism or better my differently wired/build brain, causes medication work differently, sometimes side effects occur (majorly) that are only very rare, or effects totally don’t show, I even can take medication that is supposed for something else than I am taking it for, but just is the only thing that works for me.
This somewhat differently reacting to the first pills, rendered them useless because at a dose that would send “normal” people or elephants straight away to dreamy town, would do exactly nothing for me.
After my shrink figured out that medication that normally will do the job are no guaranty when it comes to treating me, more likely they would do more harm than good and we have to find solutions with trial and error.
finally we found that another sibling in the family of the first pill, but was more for keeping someone asleep than getting to sleep where I needed help with.
Where I know I can be “somewhat” slow in getting situations, people or what is actually said, my body seems to follow suit, for example when I hit my toe against something, it sometimes takes seconds before I scream “yausers”. People have informed me, looking at this happening is very funny, me reacting delayed to physical harm.
In case of this new medication it turns out to be the same, where someone normally would take this pill minutes for going to bed, I had to take it two to three hours before going to bed, at a (very) low dose, but still it kept me dozy next morning after ten.
I am still somewhat hesitant to use medication, for I believe strongly that you should use pills for a limited period and only to support/maintain the body and mind until an actual solution has been found.
In my case the pills only helped to keep my reserves from depletion and prevent physical harm from not sleeping. But they did nothing for me to getting back into a normal sleep pattern.
So I got some counseling and therapy besides the pills to figure out what was causing the sleeplessness in the first place, it was quickly clear that it was stress and (irrational) fear, just like with most people who find themselves deprived of sleep.
After some time and noting going disastrous wrong despite my (irrational) fears for it, the stress level lowered and I started to “understand”/accept that the fears where irrational. I started to wean off process from the daytime pills and even lower the already low dose of the nighttime pills.
But getting to sleep was still a skill that seemed to elude me, because I had some new reserves build up, I had some time to figure it out. One evening I got to bed and after a short while fell asleep just fine, but the next night knowing I could do it, it was only early morning that I got a few minutes of sleep.
So because this is the way I/my brain works, I started to analyze what was the difference between that good night and all the others, it finally broke down into 3 parts and since I actively use these 3 parts I get all the sleep I need (not always/seldom as much as I want, but always as much as it turns out I need).
1. The title of this post contains the most important discovery I made, the one thing that kept me from getting to sleep was, me telling myself “now get to sleep”, “I really need to sleep” but also “I know this night I will get no sleep”.
So me stressing about sleeping was keeping from it, how to change that, hmm that needs a two way approach.
a. remove the “need” part, I did this by accepting, I sleep if I sleep and if I don’t it’s just as fine with me, so making/treating it more in a fatalism way, it’s good what ever happens on the sleeping front, at least my body will get some relaxation by laying down.
b. ban the thought about (need to) sleep from your mind during the time when you need to sleep.
That first night in a long time that I did sleep all by myself, my mind was occupied by a SyFi TV series I just had seen, it was the first time I saw that series that much I know, however I can’t remember which one it was, this prevented my mind to wander back to the “I need to got some sleep now”, but that was exactly what I got.
Since then I guide my mind into safe territory (I will explain this in a moment) when it wanders of to that thought of “need to sleep” but this redirecting is only possible when the “need” part is reduced significant enough in your mind.
2. I have to close this day and prepare for tomorrow and my body has to get into the rest mode, but this doesn’t need hours of pondering or stressing on the “what if square”. So when I get to bed I allow myself a limited time to go over my day and prepare for tomorrow, I do this mainly by not think of the mental things but more the physical actions, “what did I do”, “what did I forget”, ”what need I to do tomorrow”, “who have I got to call tomorrow, because I forgot it today” and not “what is going to happen now I forgot that” or “When I call him/her there is going to be a discussion, how can I avoid that, how do I keep them content, bla bla bla…”
I tend to close the day and prepare for the next by treating it as a todo list.
Not that I block out all preparation for a confrontation with someone/something the next day, but I try to limit the depth of the possibilities.
But most important is that this all may take half an hour or so, this is also the time for my body to get into the rest mode so I have combined these two, for if I am ready after 5 minutes with the closing and preparing and going to try to get some sleep it just doesn’t work for my body is still slowing down to the rest mode and I have to give it this time.
3. Create an save (mental) territory where you can go to or guide/redirect you thoughts when your mind wanders into unwanted places.
You need this place for both point 1 and 2 for it is the place where you go if you start pondering about not sleeping yet, but also when you start stressing about the things you did today or will have to do tomorrow or when your time for closing and preparing is over.
a few basic characteristics of this place are:
-no real persons or places close to where you are at that time,
-if possible no real things at all,
-slightly positive intent (so no negativity here, but also no hosanna, the middle or lightly to the plus side of it is just fine).
For example, if you are a animal lover and a nerd: maybe you can talk to animals and help them, when you are more materialistic: you become rich (but Bill Gates rich), how would you design your house into detail which materials which finish and so on, if magic and cosmology is more your thing you have magical powers and you are a traveler between galaxies, a people person: you can heal people.
Build this place/world/story so you can visit when you need to, but make more than one of them, if you can, without forcing yourself, for after a while a place can be not enough to redirect your attention, but one of the other realms maybe can.
Reserve these places for nighttime, when daydreaming/writing/blogging/acting build/use others, for the night time places have to be egocentric and just for you, so using your powers to help your kid from being bullied at school is wrong (it’s a real person, place and event), you can ponder on that/do that while awake not when trying to get some sleep, everything is designed to detach you from worries/situations of real life and only for the glory of you.
Things have to be right following your moral compass, so you don’t (have to) worry about consequences, your ego is stimulated, this also allows you to do what, and go where, real social moral doesn’t allow you to.
At first when you start at a place, it can be keeping you from getting a early start on sleeping, but it becomes more useful/easier the more you visit that place, also that first time isn’t bad for it keeps you from stressing out on real issues that are for the daytime to stress out on, build your places in detail so you can lose yourself in them.
And when your mind wanders to real daytime troubles just guide it back to where you left off or where you normally start, this will take some practice in recognizing your mind has wandered and getting it back but again the more you do it the easier it gets.
To sum them up:
1. Let your body decide when it sleeps or not, it’s good either way, relax and don’t stress about it.
2. Give your body time to get into “rest mode”
Close your day and prepare for the next day, practically and within a limited time frame.
3. Night time is “your time” so create places in your mind where you can go and detach from daytime worries.
These three (and a half) points are working for me since that insomnia period years ago, giving me all the rest (sleep) I or my body decides need, yes sometimes they work better than other times but I have never had a long time without sleep ever since.
Once in a while (3 months or so) is skip a complete night of sleep, but it doesn’t limit my functioning the next day if even without that sleep feel fit, I know this and it no longer worries me, even the next night doesn’t have to be a great night, somehow my body knows what it needs and I just try to provide it with the right circumstances that is all.
I hope some of you insomniacs will find some of these things useful and get a little more sleep out of it.
Goodbye, goodnight, and sleep well.
Note: both photo’s I ripped of the internets so they are not me or mine, I don’t even own an animal, so if you object me using one of them please tell me and I will remove it.