My sleep diary

[broccoliismycrack]

I had a course of CBT for sleep. I made progress for a couple of weeks then the counsellor implied I was obsessed with the time I was going to bed and the number of hours of sleep I was getting so I stopped focusing on that. He got me to focus on the wake up time with the theory that you then naturally go to bed at the right time for you. Bed times crcrepup to 11, 12, 1, 2, even 4am. I am exhausted.

My day to day work life is a little chaotic and I'm about to start with an ADHD coach to help. I know that sleep is extremely beneficial for my mental well being so I'm going back to habit building.

I want to be someone who gets at least 7 hours sleep a night and to be that person I need to switch off at the same time every night.

Well, you are an adult, and you are choosing what time to go to bed. If you choose 1am, or 2am or 4am, that is on you!

Sun night 3.56 - 8.45. 4hr 18.
Mon night 1.26 - 7.19. 5hr 14.
Tue night 0.25 - 9am. 7hr 46.

@60andsomething that's fantastic, thanks so much for the encouragement! Have a good day.

I'm sorry but what am I missing? You say you are not sleeping enough, and then you say you don't go to bed until 1am or 2am or 4am!!!

What is there to say in response!? honestly! Go to bed!

What's the underlying issue with sleep?

Ie why did you go the sleep coach in the first place?

When working on sleep most coaches will use a variety of strategies some of which will work for you and some won't.

If you had adhd then "naturally" noticing you are tired and going to sleep is unlikely to work for you.

I interpreted your response as encouragement .

The reason for the very late bedtimes is that my manager has given me last minute reports to write. I can't understand why they are coming up last minute as the official deadlines are not until much later. Hence mentioning working with a coach to get a better grasp on systems.

However bed times before that had crept to midnight which is still later than I would like.

I stand by wishing you a nice day.

@Octavia64
I'm not sure, I can manage 3-4 nights then I will have a night if complete insomnia. I can only think that my body clock is a mess and I somehow like the feeling of sleep deprivation as it drives me to focus on what has to get done as a minimum as I have less energy. My goal was pretty simple, to get through 7 days of 7 hours sleep a night. But it's the underlying habits that will lead to that.

I don't believe I only need 6 hrs sleep (the counsellor said 6-10 was ok), as I am now 43 and it helps my mood a lot to sleep more.

I slept for 5 hours a night for most of my 30s as I had a 4 hr daily round trip commute and would get home in shut down mode from a busy day and stay up late reading to switch off.

When I sleep less I get negative thoughts, I can literally see the correlation and my focus is less, I feel miserable basically.

ADHD isn't part of most counsellors training. I need both ends, the wake up time, the bed Time and enough time in bed. I did get some positive things from it, my bedroom is only associated with sleep now, I.e. decluttered, no devices etc. The other thing was during the CBT he was away for several sessions due to holiday, illness and we had two bank holidays, so it got extended and two weeks between sessions didn't work for me, so I probably didn't make as much progress as I could.

Look up revenge sleep procrastination and see if this fits, I have ADHD and struggle with this

It sounds like your CBT counsellor was right, you seem to be focusing on the time/hours of sleep you're getting and it's preventing you from actually sleeping/sleeping well (I sympathise as an insomniac myself - been there!)

I wholeheartedly recommend looking up a website called insomniacoach - the guys name is Martin Reed. I didn't pay for his personalised coaching service (that's an option on his website though), I just signed up to receive daily emails, not thinking much of it at the time as nothing at all had helped up to that point, but the advice in those emails helped me beyond belief. I went from not sleeping at all/getting 2/3 hours on a good night, to falling asleep and staying asleep with ease within about 3 weeks. In a nutshell, I basically stopped giving a shit whether I slept or not and voila, knock out.

I hope it improves swiftly for you. I've suffered episodes of insomnia from time to time for years, but I recently experienced it every single night for over 3 months, and my mental health was the worst it's ever been. X

Thanks I will have a look. Open to any resources. The focus on time asleep came from the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. It had some pretty devastating information on how damaging it is to get under 6 hours sleep a night.

I don't have a problem falling asleep. I'm usually asleep within seconds or minutes. If the tracker means anything I can be restless and maybe wake for 45 mins but don't remember it. And my quality of sleep seems OK.

Except for like I say every say 4th night when I get the stare at the wall insomnia which seems to come from being more awake and realising how much there is to tackle and then worrying about the nitty gritty of doing it all. Maybe that just is how it is and I should accept the flow and try and control the worst of it. But it's very hard as the insomnia night affects my mood and my focus at work which then affects how much I get done which then affects the quality of my free time as it has to get done.

It also quite negatively has an effect as I take immune suppressants for an extremely rare progressive condition I discovered I have always had about 6 years ago, the effect being that I get more prone to sinusitis / migraine from the immune suppressant if I haven't had enough sleep. I have to take the immune suppressant every day for the rest of my life. I know I have a choice not to but then I would be a burden on the NHS as I would eventually die from it. That's probably the reason more than anything that I seem to obsess about health as I'm in my early 40s and there is a lot of life ahead and I want to be at my best and enjoy it.

I probably need more of a buffer on my time in the day which actualy I have recently been building in daily I.e. blocking out some time at work to review progress, deal with anything urgent that has come up. So if I'm a bit blurry and not 100% switched on then it's okay.

Thanks will defo check out the website. My therapist sent me an interesting booklet on sleep with lots of different techniques, one of them was conscious sleep deprivation as a way to get back into a rhythm. I just need to print the booklet out as it was hard to read on my phone as the pages went wierd. It's about 40 pages long though. But I will print it.

I also wasn't slating my therapist at all, I did learn stuff and h e made me feel great, but I guess I am just disappointed as I wanted to sleep well for a whole week. It didn't seem like too much of a lofty goal 😂