Insomnia: Time Goes Slow or Fast?

When you have insomnia, time seems to do strange things. Sometimes it feels like time is going extremely slow, and other times time seems to go very fast.

Today I talk about why this happens and what is really going on when you experience this. And this is good news!

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WHAT I DO:
I help people overcome insomnia and get good sleep (without medication, drugs or supplements).

To Your Sleeping Better!
- Steve

RESOURCES
CBT-I Playlist

00:00 Understanding Insomnia and Time Perception
00:34 Introducing Dr. Steve Orma
00:49 Experiencing Slow Time During Insomnia
01:24 Experiencing Fast Time During Insomnia
02:34 The Role of Sleep Pressure and Hyperarousal
03:29 Judging Sleep by Time Perception
06:33 Overcoming Insomnia with CBT-I
07:03 Conclusion and Channel Information

TRANSCRIPT
Understanding Insomnia and Time Perception

When you have insomnia, sometimes time seems to do strange things. Sometimes time seems like it's going really fast, and other times it seems like it's going excruciatingly slow.

Probably more often you experience the slow, and the night, it just seems to go on forever because you're not sleeping, and you're tossing and turning. And you're anxious and you're frustrated. And so the night is quite miserable.

But quite often people experience time going fast.

And I thought today what would be helpful is for me to talk about time and kind of what is going on when you're experiencing time going either slow or going fast.

Who I Am

My name is Dr. Steve Orma. I'm a clinical psychologist and a specialist in insomnia and anxiety, and I help people overcome insomnia and get their sleep back. without having to take medication or supplements or do any of the usual kinds of things that people do.

Let’s talk about these two experiences of time.

Experiencing Slow Time During Insomnia

First of all, slow. When you're experiencing time, go very slowly. This is probably more common when you have insomnia, because if you're awake and you're lying in the bed and you're not [00:01:00] sleeping, it's quite a miserable experience. It's not a pleasant experience for most people. Sometimes, after people have had insomnia for a long time, they can actually become relaxed and they're not anxious when they're lying in the bed.

But still it's kind of like tiring and boring to just lie there for hours not sleeping.

So when time is going slow, it means that you are awake, that you are awake during that time.

Experiencing Fast Time During Insomnia

Now, when time seems to go fast. So quite often people have the experience of, you know, feeling like they only slept an hour or two hours, or sometimes not at all. But the time seems to go really fast. And what's going on there is that you are sleeping during part of that time.

In my program, when people are going through the, the process of overcoming insomnia, they are recording, they're keeping a sleep log recording, you know, how long it took them to fall asleep, if they woke up, how long they were up during the night and then what time they got up in the morning. And they're doing that all by estimation because it's actually the best way to do it.

But [00:02:00] sometimes they're not sure what was I awake or was I sleeping? And you've probably had this experience where sometimes you're not even sure if you slept or you're awake or what was going on.

And the best way to tell is the sense of time or your experience of time. If time goes really slowly, It means that you are awake or probably awake for most of that time and you experience, you know, the actual number of hours that you are awake.

But when time seems to go really fast, when three hours seems to just fly by, that usually means that you were sleeping during that time, even if you didn't perceive the sleep, even if you weren't aware that you were sleeping.

The Role of Sleep Pressure and Hyperarousal

When you have that much sleep pressure, so when you have insomnia, you build up what's called sleep pressure, which is just this, this pressure that builds up physiologically in your body, there's actually a chemical that's released called adenosine in your brain that actually creates that pressure to sleep, that when you don't have insomnia, that's what kind of knocks you out and gives you that, that restful deep sleep.

Now, we still have sleep pressure when you have insomnia, but you don't feel it. You don't feel it because of the [00:03:00] hyperarousal. You don't feel it sometimes because there's a hyperarousal, which is this counteractive thing that happens when you have insomnia where your body's releasing adrenaline to keep you awake at the wrong times when you want to be sleeping.

But what happens is because there's so much sleep pressure, If you're lying in bed and you get relaxed enough to sleep, you'll just go to sleep. And sometimes you won't be aware that you were sleeping even for an hour. Literally, it's like a blink of an eye. You fall asleep, you're asleep for an hour, you wake up and you're not even conscious that that happened.

Judging Sleep by Time Perception

The best way to judge whether that happened or not is the time went by really fast.

Now of course, if you're trying to overcome insomnia and you're going through the process that I've talked about many times on this channel, which is CBTI, you shouldn't be looking at the clock during the night because that, for most people tends to raise their anxiety and, you know, increase the frustration and make it more difficult to sleep.

if suddenly the alarm goes off and it didn't seem like you were up the whole night or you do happen to look at the clock and it's already been four hours since you got into bed. Most likely [00:04:00] if it felt like the time went fast, you were sleeping during part of that time.

And this has actually been studied with people with insomnia is they've tested both how long people thought they were awake or how long it took them to fall asleep. And also if they woke up in the night, how long they were actually awake.

And what tends to happen is people underestimate the time that they actually slept by around on average 30 minutes. And they overestimate the time that they were awake or the time it took them to So, um, Insomnia is when you fall asleep or fall back asleep also by around 30 minutes.

Which means if you have insomnia, you could be underestimating the amount of time you're actually sleeping overall by one hour a night.

And that is when, you know, generally when the time seems to be going faster. You think you're awake during some period of time during the night, but you're actually not awake.

Now, some people have this kind of experience where they don't feel like they're sleeping at all. But the human body is built to sleep and after a certain period of time, you will have to sleep. Your body will put you to sleep, whether you're conscious of it or not. And [00:05:00] even though you may never perceive that you're sleeping or sleeping during a certain period of time and you're awake the whole night or you're awake for a certain period of time.

But, for most people, they're going to be sleeping even when they're not realizing that they're sleeping.

And I talk about this because it helps people with their anxiety. There's a lot of anxiety around, sometimes if you feel like you didn't sleep at all or you only slept for an hour or two, when in reality you probably slept at least a little longer than that, 30 minutes or an hour longer than that, and sometimes quite a bit more if it feels like the time went by fast.

So the next time this happens to you, if you have that experience of you feel like you're not sleeping, but the time is going quickly, tell yourself it was probably because I slept, because otherwise you would experience that time in more in the slow way. When you're not sleeping, if you're experiencing it fast, then that means that you slept and you, you can tell yourself that helps with the negative sleep thoughts. Instead of you saying, Oh, I didn't sleep at all. I only slept an hour. You most likely slept [00:06:00] longer than that. And that can help just make you feel better about that night and the next day.

How you frame your sleep when you're going through insomnia, meaning how you're thinking. Thinking about it has a huge impact on how you feel the next day.

So if you wake up and you think, Oh, I hardly slept at all or only slept an hour when in reality you slept two hours or you slept double that because the time went by really fast, that's going to make you feel better about the sleep that you got. And that's actually going to make you feel better physically during that day, just by your perception of how you slept.

And that's accurate because that's been studied and that's most likely what is going on.

Overcoming Insomnia with CBT-I

But ultimately, we want to overcome insomnia. We don't want to, you know, suffer with this and deal with this indefinitely. And if you want to do that, I've talked about how to do that. It's with the gold standard treatment, which is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia or CBT-I.

I'll put a link to, I have a playlist that goes over what CBT-I is and some other videos related to that. That is the treatment that you want to do if you're dealing with insomnia. Insomnia, particularly three months or longer, but even shorter term, many times it can be [00:07:00] really helpful for, uh, for that kind of insomnia as well.

Conclusion and Channel Information

Alright, so if you found this video helpful, just press the like button, and you can also subscribe to the channel. I do two videos like this every week. And I hope you have a good rest of your week and I will see you next time.