The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Anyone have any tips for anxiety/obsessive-based insomnia? Aka worrying so much about not sleeping that you end up not sleeping, and the cycle continues. Lots of lying in bed in a hyper-charged, anxious, wired state. How to break the cycle and change my mentality?
I've struggled here and there with insomnia for the last decade, but a recent bad spell caught me off guard. In the past CBT-I helped, maybe I pick that up again, but I dunno. This time feels different.
What do I worry about now? I worry about it getting worse. I worry about causing irreparable mental health damage to myself. I worry about not being able to support my family. I even worry about going clinically insane from lack of sleep. None of this has happened, but I worry about it spiraling into that. It's all rooted in self-perpetuating worrying. I'm really good at obsessive and cyclic worrying. :)
So what am I working on now? Meeting my situation with acceptance. Trying to "let go". Trying to "stop trying". It's a little abstract. If I can let go of control, and accept and face my fears, I think my worries will subside. And I think this will all slowly fade. The best sleepers I know? They just don't think about any of this. I need to be the same, just relax and chill and whatever happens happens, dude. I read a few Reddit and blog posts that advocated this approach, it resonated with me. And yeah, I know that even posting this post is kinda breaking my own rule here, on a meta level.
But ya, it's hard. Looking for more tips and healthy mental frameworks. Or magic bullets... although I know those don't exist. :P
My wife always had similar issues, mulling obsessively over everything that happened during the day, or that has happened some time ago, or what could happen in the future. For her, it got substantially better after having kids. Getting so exhausted that you're simply too tired to stay awake is definitely one way. Maybe it was also partially hormonal, and the pregnancy improved that.
In that spirit, have you tried physical exertion? That has often helped her. In general, trying to fix her thinking hasn't helped much on this, but more "pragmatic" approaches did. Melatonin also helped.
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