confession of a bad sleeper

As a chronic insomniac, I have tried a host of problem-solving, none of which has been terribly convincing.
Let me count the ways:
herbal teas, self-guided hypnosis, meditation, Nyquil, Tylenol PM, melatonin, St John's Wort, colder temperatures, warmer temperatures, lectures, music history textbooks, research articles, phone calls to family across the ocean in the middle of the night, letter and journal writing, internet surfing, talk therapy, tv shows, music, sparkling water or hot tea, running and weight-lifting, yoga. (I do refuse to try alcohol and stronger OTC and prescription sleep aids, so don't bother asking.)

Sadly, the older I have gotten, the more I fear going to bed. My sleep patterns are all over the map. Some days I cannot fall asleep at all, sometimes I fall asleep immediately for 20 minutes and then am buzzed for hours, some days I go to bed so late and a 5am sleep cycle break comes pouncing upon me. And I am most terrified of going to bed too early because I am almost guaranteed to wake up.

In other words, it's a mess.

The most helpful longterm solution by far has been 5am yoga classes, something sadly not in my current budget anymore.

The least helpful problem that incites my sleepless to self-perpetuate: worrying. Past, present, and future), aka ruminating on what is not happening in my life and my goals, what I want to happen but may never come about, or specific occurrences in the past that I feel guilty about.


This is the first bit of information that resonates with me: accepting it for what it is.

If you find yourself awake in the middle of night worrying, with thoughts whirling round repeatedly in your head, he has several strategies you can try. This is where imagery comes in useful again. Imagine there’s a box under your bed. This is your worry box. As soon as you spot thoughts that are worries, imagine taking those individual worries, putting them into the box and closing the lid. They are then to remain in the box under the bed until you decide to get them out again. If the worries recur, remind yourself that they are in the box and won’t be attended to until later on. An alternative is to choose a colour and then picture a cloud of that color. Put your worries into the cloud and let it swirl backwards and forwards above your head. Then watch it slowly float up and away, taking the worrying thoughts with it.

Set aside a time for worrying. Your worries relate to real and practical problems in your life, so you cannot rid yourself of them altogether, but you can learn to control when you think about them. Fyodor Dostoyevsky famously commanded his brother not to think of a white bear, and we know from the experiment on thought suppression which followed that, given that instruction, you can think of nothing but a white bear. … Likewise, telling people not to think of their worries isn’t going to work. Instead Kerkhof recommends the opposite. Set aside 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening to do nothing but worry about the future. Sit at a table, make a list of all your problems and then think about them. But as soon as the time is up you must stop worrying, and whenever those worries come back into your head remind yourself that you can’t contemplate them again until your next worry time. You have given yourself permission to postpone your worrying until the time of your choice. Remarkably, it can work. It puts you in control.

from Claudia Hammond's Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception 

via {brain pickings}