5 MORE Weird Things That Happen With Insomnia
Clients report to me all the time weird or strange things that they experience with insomnia. I also experienced some of these things when I had insomnia years ago.
Last week I highlighted 5 of these weird things. Today I highlight 5 MORE weird things that people experience with insomnia that are common:
Weird Thing #1: When you’re about to fall asleep, you jerk awake
Weird Thing #2: You can’t tell if you’re sleeping or awake
Weird Thing #3: Medication (or supplements) works some nights but not others
Weird Thing #4: Before insomnia you had no trouble sleeping
Weird Thing #5: You can sleep on the couch but not in bed
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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 Introduction to Insomnia's Weird Phenomena
00:17 Hypnic Jerks: The Sudden Wake-Up Call
03:07 Sleep-Wake Confusion: Am I Asleep or Awake?
04:50 Inconsistent Effects of Medications and Supplements
08:48 From Perfect Sleeper to Insomniac: What Changed?
11:01 Couch Sleepers: Why the Bed Feels Different
13:30 Conclusion and Tips for Overcoming Insomnia
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction to Insomnia's Weird Phenomena
Last week, I talked about five weird things that happen with insomnia that are very common and totally normal. Today, I'm going to talk about five more weird things that happen with insomnia. My name is Dr. Steve Orma. I'm a clinical psychologist and a specialist in insomnia and anxiety. So let's dive right in.
Hypnic Jerks: The Sudden Wake-Up Call
The first weird thing that can happen when you have insomnia is that just about when you're going to fall asleep, you suddenly jerk awake.
I don't see this a lot. I don't think this is very common with insomnia, but I've seen this with a decent number of clients that I've seen, which is that they get into bed and they're relaxed and they start actually going to sleep. But just before they fall asleep, they jerk awake and sometimes they might even sort of sit up and get startled.
And, this could be very strange for some people. This might even happen several times in a row when they're going to sleep. And it can be strange because why is this happening? And it can also be very frustrating because you're just about asleep and then you suddenly jerk awake again.
So this could be happening from a couple of different [00:01:00] things, but generally I think what's going on here is when someone has insomnia, They have anxiety around their sleep and they have what's called hyper arousal, which is this, you know, your body kicking into kind of this hyper gear to keep you awake.
Because you're not getting enough sleep. It is keeping you awake at the wrong time when you want to be going to sleep. And so you have this hyper arousal. So when you're in that state or when you're anxious, it's difficult to let go. And to be able to fall asleep, you have to be able to let go. And you have to be able to let go not just physically, but you have to be able to let go mentally.
Meaning you have to let your conscious mind go, your reasoning mind, and just let your subconscious and your sleep system, which is just built into you naturally, take over.
And what happens between that transition of letting go of your conscious mind and drifting into sleep is your conscious mind, at some level, is still observing your sleep.
And this is very common. What happens with insomnia and why it can make it difficult to fall [00:02:00] asleep sometimes is people have a hard time letting go. Like even when you're focused on just let go, just relax. Part of your mind is observing whether you're falling asleep or not because you're so worried and concerned and you want to fall asleep so badly that you're watching it.
And because you're watching it, You know, even if you start drifting into sleep, you'll suddenly jerk awake because your conscious mind is still awake. It's still watching and you have to let that go.
That's usually the main thing that's causing these hypnic jerks just you're not fully relaxed and then as you're going into sleep, you're jerking awake.
Now, sometimes I've seen this happen with people if they're drinking a lot of alcohol in the evening, which can definitely affect your sleep and your sleep system. And that could be one thing that as you start to relax your body sort of jerks almost like you're falling. Like there's a sense of falling sometimes when you're going to sleep, particularly when you're really tired or possibly when you're drinking alcohol. And so it's sort of like a defensive mechanism to sort of jerk awake to make sure that you're safe.
So it's [00:03:00] normal as far as I know, there's nothing like this can't hurt you. It's just, you know, annoying and irritating and obviously interferes with your ability to fall asleep.
Sleep-Wake Confusion: Am I Asleep or Awake?
Weird thing number two that happens with insomnia is you can't tell if you're sleeping or awake. Now, this is a very common thing that my clients report to me that they experience. And I also experienced this when I had insomnia is that as they go through the night, sometimes it's difficult for them to know whether they're awake or whether they're asleep.
Sometimes it seems like they're dreaming, and then it seems like they're awake. And, you know, they're not quite sure which is going on here.
So like when you're going through CBTI, which is the gold standard treatment for insomnia, and it's what my insomnia program is built on, you're actually tracking your sleep each night or in the next morning after a night, you're recording what happened.
And sometimes people find it challenging to know, well, how long did it take me to sleep? Common words for a person who can't sleep, like, uh, I don't know if it's fall asleep or or when I woke up or because they're not quite sure when they're sleeping and
Okay, this is a normal thing that happens, and what's going on there is just because you're [00:04:00] not fully relaxed, your sleep is restless. It's more shallow, it's more choppy. This is particularly true also if you are taking medication, or other things that could interfere with sleep like alcohol as well. But just even if you're not taking medication and you're not drinking alcohol, this is a normal thing that happens with insomnia because you're just not fully relaxing into your sleep.
So you're literally going into sleep, you're coming out of sleep, you're going in, you're coming out, and it can be confusing because sometimes you're not sure whether you're awake or whether you're asleep, and that's normal.
And really, again, it's just part of insomnia and the way to get over that and to smooth out the sleep is to overcome, kind of get rid of that hyperarousal which you do through the process of CBTI or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for insomnia, which is the main treatment for insomnia, the gold standard that you want to do.
Inconsistent Effects of Medications and Supplements
Weird thing number three that happens with insomnia is medications or supplements seem to work on some nights, but not on others.
So this is very, very common with [00:05:00] medication, or even if you're just taking supplements, or sometimes people are taking a combination of these things, where it seems like, you know, you take your medication, whatever that is, and you sleep great, and you think, the medication really helped me sleep last night, and then you take it the next night, and it doesn't seem to work.
You're baffled because sometimes it seems to work and sometimes it doesn't seem to work. You might be taking a supplement like magnesium or melatonin or something like that. Sometimes it seems to work, sometimes it doesn't.
So what's going on here is a couple of things. Number one, just on the physical level, on the physiological level, medication can be If it works, and when I say works, it sedates you, it knocks you out, it doesn't actually address the underlying problem of insomnia. I've talked about this a lot. It doesn't get to the root cause of the insomnia. It's just sedating you. It has a, you know, it makes you sleepy and knocks you out.
So when it's working to do that, Then it works. Then it knocks you out. You sleep and sometimes you sleep through the night and you feel like, well, I got sleep. You know, it's not [00:06:00] always the best quality sleep, but you sleep.
But what happens is with medications, all medications, you build up tolerance. Tolerance means that over time, the same amount of that medication doesn't have the same effect. It starts not working as well because your body builds up sort of a tolerance, it gets used to it. So it's not like this new thing that's been introduced to your body where it has a really strong effect on your system. Our bodies are built to adapt. So it adapts essentially to the medication over time.
And in order to get the same effect that you had before, you have to either increase the dose, which is what happens many times. When people are taking medications for sleep, their doctor will just say, well, let's increase the dose.
Or they'll switch you to another medication. And then you'll just keep playing this game of, you know, changing dosages and switching to different medications to sort of outsmart the tolerance to your body is building up tolerance to a certain medication. So that's one thing that happens on the physical level with medications.
On another level, on the psychological level, there's this thing called the placebo [00:07:00] effect. You're probably familiar with this, but what the placebo effect is it's a mental effect on our physical bodies.
And this is a very well researched, documented phenomenon that happens with treatments, with medications, is if you believe something is going to work, then it actually helps it work. Or sometimes it works, but just because you believe it will work,
Right? So they've done a lot of studies where someone's given, you know, one group is given the actual medication, another group is given usually it's a sugar pill. There's no medication, but they tell them this is a sleep medication. And both groups sleep just as well, because the group that took the sugar pill actually believed it was the medication. And it was just that belief that actually caused them to sleep. This is actually the power of the mind and the mind plays a huge part of when someone has insomnia.
So when you're taking medication what happens is sometimes the medication is actually helping you sleep But sometimes medication isn't and it's just the placebo effect, your belief that it will help you therefore you're more calm, you're expecting you to sleep better. And [00:08:00] because you're more calm and less anxious and confident you're going to sleep better, you actually end up sleeping better.
And then these two things can get mixed up. Sometimes it's the placebo, sometimes it's the medication, sometimes it's a combination. And it's impossible to tell when you're taking the medication, you can't tell because you don't know. Which one is which because you're taking the medication.
This is another thing that happens both with the supplements and the medication is this placebo effect and the placebo effect is inconsistent.
Medication is inconsistent and placebo doesn't last forever, right? If that belief worked forever then someone taking the medication would just continue getting a good result because they were, they believed at one point the medication was working. When the medication stops working on a physical level, it starts to create doubt and And it starts to undermine that placebo effect, and that's why you get these sort of different results with medication.
From Perfect Sleeper to Insomniac: What Changed?
The fourth weird thing that happens with insomnia is that before insomnia you had no trouble sleeping. Now this is not true for everybody, some people come to me and they've had trouble sleeping their whole life, they've, [00:09:00] you know, been difficult sleepers their whole life.
But many people have no problem sleeping and then they develop insomnia. And this was the case for me. I slept perfectly fine until my mid forties. And then I suddenly got really bad insomnia, right? So you could have really good sleep, have no trouble sleeping, no anxiety. You get into bed, you go to sleep and have that for decades, and then all of a sudden you, get insomnia.
The reason for that is this is not a medical or a genetic issue. It's not something that you're born with. It's something that comes from a change in your behaviors in response to usually some kind of trigger that interferes with your sleep. I've talked about this many times, but this is what's called the insomnia cycle, or I call this the insomnia cycle where there's some trigger in your life that That interferes with your sleep. It could be travel, it could be a stressor you're changing jobs, you're going through a relationship stress, a medical issue, that interferes with your sleep, and it causes some poor sleep, which is not insomnia at that point. That's normal, that happens with everybody.
And usually, the way you probably responded [00:10:00] to that was, Oh, okay, you know, I'm having some difficult sleeping because this thing's going on. And you don't really make any significant changes to your sleep. You just expect you're going to get past it. And then you do.
But what happens with insomnia is you have the poor sleep and you're got, and you react with, Oh my God, this is not good. I'm having trouble sleeping. Maybe there's something wrong.
And you start doing things. You start changing your behavior and those behaviors, which you're doing to help you sleep make the sleep worse, and that turns into insomnia over time.
So it's totally normal to be a really good sleeper and then suddenly get insomnia. There's not something wrong with you. You didn't suddenly develop some, you know, weird medical issue that you never had. It's just coming from the insomnia.
Okay, assuming, you know, there isn't a medical issue. Sometimes people do have medical issues and you do always want to rule that out. Or maybe it's sleep apnea and you want to rule that out.
But if it's not coming from those things and you've ruled them out, it's insomnia and it's coming from those shifts in behavior and the way you're thinking about your sleep rather than some internal thing like a, like a medical or [00:11:00] physiological issue that's going on.
Couch Sleepers: Why the Bed Feels Different
And the fifth weird thing that happens with insomnia is you can sleep on the couch but not in the bed.
Okay, this is extremely common where you have insomnia and you're in bed and you're trying to sleep and you're struggling and you're tossing and you're turning and you're there and it's like two hours later and you're just sick of being in the bed so you get up, you go to another room and you sit or you lie down on your couch or in a chair.
And you might be doing something. You might turn on the TV, you might be reading a book, and then before you know it, you're asleep. And you end up sleeping on the couch, and because you're able to sleep there you stay there. And you might sleep the rest of the night there, or a couple hours there, but you're able to sleep on the couch.
Okay, now what's going on here? Well, When this happens with my clients, number one, I celebrate because first of all, yes, we don't want you sleeping on the couch unless that's where you want to sleep ultimately is to sleep on the couch and not in your bed. But if you ultimately want to sleep in your bed, then you don't want to be sleeping on the couch when you have insomnia because it starts to confuse your brain and you start to train yourself to sleep [00:12:00] there instead of the bed.
But why have clients celebrate this is it shows them they have not lost the ability to sleep. If you're falling asleep on the couch, if you're having a , difficult time keeping your eyes open, like before you go to bed at night, if you're really sleepy and drowsy during the day, that tells you have not lost the ability to sleep.
The problem with insomnia is that the timing is off. And there's an association with your bed now with wakefulness. So you could be falling asleep on the sofa, you get into bed, you go to sleep at night, and then suddenly you become alert. Okay?
And this was one of those weird things I talked about last week, with the other five weird things is that you could be exhausted, you could be falling asleep on the couch, you get into bed and you become alert.
So this is normal. And this also doesn't happen with everybody. Some people with insomnia don't ever get sleepy on the couch. They don't get drowsy during the day. So if that's happening with you, if you always are feeling alert during the day and you never get sleepy, you know half of the people that have insomnia experienced that and half experienced the other thing.
But what generally happens is once you start going through the process of overcoming insomnia you're going through [00:13:00] that process and your sleep starts to improve, you will start to feel that drowsiness during the day, because now you become more relaxed and your body is more in tune with how tired you actually are and you start to feel more of that drowsiness. And that's a good thing because again, it reminds you, I have not lost my ability to sleep.
So you don't want to stay on the couch and you don't want to sleep on the couch. If you get up in the middle of the night and you fall asleep there, you want to get back into bed as soon as you catch that because otherwise you'll train yourself to sleep on the couch.
Conclusion and Tips for Overcoming Insomnia
All right, so I hope it's helpful for me to kind of list these weird things that happen, because I think sometimes when these people experiencing these things they get really anxious, they get worried. Is there something wrong with me? Is this abnormal? You know, you might feel like you're the only person in the world that's experiencing these things, but all of these things are very common.
I experienced many of them when I had insomnia. Yes, they're not pleasant, they're not good. You, you want to, If you want to address the insomnia, like if you want to not have to experience this stuff then go through the process of overcoming insomnia. I've talked about it many times on this channel, [00:14:00] which is CBTI, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia.
It's the only treatment that addresses the root of insomnia. Causes of insomnia helps you come off medication if you want to if you're taking it and has a very high success rate And I'll leave a link in the in the show notes below the video Where I have other videos where I talk about this.
If you like this video and you found it helpful just press the like button and you can also subscribe To the channel I do two of these videos every week.
And if you have questions or comments or other weird things that have happened to you, then post those in the comments below. And I do Q& A videos every once in a while when I get questions, and I'll do a video for you if you leave questions that you want me to answer. So have a good rest of your day, and I will see you next time.