Overcome Insomnia NOW: Benefit #2: CONSISTENT Sleep
Today I continue the new series where I highlight all the amazing benefits of overcoming insomnia and restoring healthy sleep NOW.
Benefit #2 of overcoming insomnia: Consistent Sleep.
When you have insomnia:
Sleep is inconsistent
Quantity varies every night (how long you sleep)
WHEN you have insomnia varies (have on some nights but not others)
What type of insomnia can vary (difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep, both)
How you feel the next day varies (emotionally & physically)
Sleep pattern changes over time, sometimes better, sometimes worse
When you get rid of insomnia:
Sleep becomes consistent
Quantity stays within a tight range (e.g., 7-7.5 hours per night)
You sleep well (quantity and quality) on most nights over the long-term
You have only very occasional nights of poor sleep
You feel well rested and restored on most days
Sleep is generally good, deep, restful, and pleasant
Sleep will usually get better over time after overcoming insomnia
If you’re interested in getting rid of your insomnia NOW, check out the CBT-I playlist below and learn about the first-line treatment for insomnia and where you can find it.
// SLEEP SERVICES //
https://www.drorma.com/insomnia-services
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Put Insomnia to Bed channel https://www.youtube.com/c/PutInsomniaToBed
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 Series
00:17 Understanding Insomnia and Its Measures
01:20 Inconsistencies in Sleep Patterns
05:40 Achieving Consistent Sleep
09:26 Benefits of Overcoming Insomnia
12:01 Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I)
12:56 Conclusion and Next Steps
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction to Insomnia Series
Today, I'm going to continue my series that I just started on the benefits of overcoming insomnia now.
In the last video, I highlighted the first benefit of overcoming insomnia, which is an improved mood. And today I'm going to talk about another benefit, which is consistent sleep.
Understanding Insomnia and Its Measures
My name is Dr. Steve Orma and I'm a clinical psychologist and a specialist in helping people overcome insomnia, get their sleep back to a normal healthy pattern and do that without taking medications.
When I work with clients, I use three measures to assess whether someone has overcome insomnia or not. How do you know when you go from having insomnia to not having insomnia, because it's not like an all of a sudden thing that happens in one moment, but it's sort of a gradual thing. And how do you know when you're past insomnia?
Those three measures are sleep quantity, sleep quality, and sleep consistency.
Sleep quantity is how much sleep you're getting on average per night. And what we generally want to see with most people is somewhere between [00:01:00] seven to eight hours.
Sleep quality is getting this deep restful sleep, feeling restored and refreshed the next day.
And sleep consistency is seeing these first two consistent over time each week for the long term. So you're getting consistently the right number of hours of sleep for you, and you're getting consistently good sleep quality on most nights over the long term..
Inconsistencies in Sleep Patterns
What I want to focus on today is the benefit of consistent sleep when you overcome insomnia.
When you have insomnia, sleep is inconsistent. First of all, the quantity varies every night. Now, sometimes people have kind of a consistency for a while of, I'm getting, you know, four hours of sleep a night or five hours, but generally that will vary over time and vary each night.
The second thing that's inconsistent is when you have insomnia varies. Meaning that insomnia is difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or both. And that can vary night to night. Meaning some nights people don't have difficulty falling or [00:02:00] staying asleep. And some nights they do.
And generally to meet the criteria for insomnia, you need to have difficulty falling or staying asleep for three nights or more over a period of time.
So you don't necessarily have to have difficulty sleeping every single night. And a lot of people with insomnia don't. Some nights they fall asleep fine and other nights they have great difficulty falling asleep. Some nights they fall asleep and then have difficulty going back to sleep when they wake up. And some nights they don't have that difficulty.
And this is actually one of the very frustrating things about insomnia is the inconsistency because you don't know what to expect. There's a lot of uncertainty. Am I going to sleep tonight or am I not going to sleep tonight? I hope I sleep well. What if I don't? And that feeds into the worry and the anxiety around the sleep is that inconsistency.
Another thing that's inconsistent is how you feel the next day. That will vary. And this is both emotionally and physically.
So, some days after a night of sleep, you'll feel better. You'll feel more positive. You'll feel more emotionally up probably on the nights that you [00:03:00] slept better, but not always. Sometimes people don't sleep well. Or don't sleep at all and they actually feel okay the next day, meaning they still have a good amount of energy and it's very surprising.
And this is one of those paradoxes about sleep and insomnia that confuse people sometimes. How can I get no sleep and then still have energy and be awake the next day?
I've talked about that. That's the hyper arousal that kicks in when you have insomnia. And the circadian rhythm that compensates for the lost sleep.
But obviously, over time, this, you know, this, you're still not feeling very good, right? It's not like you can go with no sleep and feel great every day. That's going to catch up, but it's inconsistent.
The point here is that some days you might feel fine or better. Some days you feel horrible, and that varies both emotionally and physically when you have insomnia.
And the last thing that's also inconsistent when you have insomnia is the sleep pattern. So your sleep pattern is simply, you know, over a given week, let's say, or a given month, what's the pattern of the sleep?
So that means what kind of insomnia are you having [00:04:00] each night? Are you having difficulty falling asleep? Difficulty staying asleep? Are you waking up early? How many nights a week is that happening? Is that happening on certain nights and other nights it's not happening? So there's a very, inconsistent pattern.
Now that could remain consistent for a week or two, but usually it changes over time. And if you've had insomnia for any period of time for a few months or longer, generally what you've seen is the insomnia doesn't stay completely consistent. You don't have insomnia, on the same nights every week for the same period of time.
And it's going to vary each week. Some weeks might be better. Some weeks are worse.
And again, the human body is not a machine in that way, and therefore it varies because the insomnia varies, how you're responding to it varies, how you're thinking about it, what else is going on in your life varies, and that makes the sleep very inconsistent when it isn't very solid and resilient.
So just to recap those things that are inconsistent when you have insomnia, the quantity of sleep varies each night. When you have insomnia, you know, whether you have insomnia on a [00:05:00] particular night, difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep will vary. How you feel the next day will vary emotionally and physically, sometimes based on how you slept and sometimes it doesn't seem to be connected to how you slept, but that will vary.
And then your sleep pattern will change and vary over time. Meaning, you know how are you sleeping night to night? Week to week, what kind of insomnia you're having, what nights you're having that insomnia on.
So all of these things can be inconsistent. Some of them can be consistent when someone has insomnia and other things aren't. So even these things can be inconsistent with each individual person. But overall, you're seeing variations in all or at least some of these areas.
Achieving Consistent Sleep
Now, when you get rid of insomnia, when you overcome it and get rid of it completely, all of these things will become consistent.
Number one, the quantity of sleep that you're getting will stay within a consistent kind of tight range. When you have insomnia, you could have like three hours of sleep one night and then seven hours the next night. Or you could have four hours [00:06:00] one night and six and a half the next night.
And the quantity varies and you're also not getting enough quantity because again, for most people, the minimum amount of sleep that you want to be getting on average is around seven hours. For some people it's more.
So if you're only getting on average, six hours a night, even if it's consistent, that's still a problem in terms of the insomnia.
So what you see when you overcome insomnia is the quantity is consistent and generally You'll be within a tighter range.
So it might be, you know, you'll get between seven and seven and a half hours a night consistently, or you'll get between seven and a half and eight hours consistently. So it may not be exactly the same every night, but you'll see a consistent average that won't vary too much. It'll still be within that seven to eight hour range almost every night over the long-term.
Secondly, you will sleep well on most nights. That means both quantity and quality of sleep will be good on most nights over the long term. You're not seeing like some nights are good, some nights are bad, but [00:07:00] generally things are good. Some nights might be better, but there's sort of a place that you don't go below in terms of how good the sleep is, and that's very consistent over weeks and months, of time.
Okay, next thing that's consistent when you overcome insomnia is that you will only have poor nights of sleep very occasionally.
So everybody will have a poor night of sleep from time to time and when you don't have insomnia usually that's caused by a stressor that's sort of immediate in your life.
Let's say you are changing jobs or you're moving, so it's a kind of a temporary stressor that you have to adjust to and that might interfere with your sleep for a short period of time. That is not insomnia, that's just normal poor sleep. because things come up in life and we have to deal with them.
It could also be caused by things like jet lag or you had some indigestion or digestive problems the previous night from something you ate. And so that disturbed your sleep, but these are short term things and they only happen very occasionally.
So when you have a poor night of sleep will just be very occasionally, maybe every [00:08:00] couple of months or every few months. I mean, it varies between person, but generally you don't have those nights that often. And sleep is generally good every night.
The next thing that's consistent is the quality, meaning you feel rested and restored and refreshed on most days. days after you sleep. So you wake up in the morning and generally you feel rested, restored. You had enough sleep. You feel refreshed and that you got recovery over the night. And that's on most nights that you're getting that sleep and you're waking up feeling that way during the day.
Another thing that's consistent when you get over insomnia is You generally don't think a lot about sleep. Now, I didn't mention this in the negatives that people when they have insomnia, they think a lot about their sleep, but that is something that generally is more consistent is the worries around the sleep.
When you overcome insomnia, You don't really think about sleep much anymore. You generally just expect that you're gonna sleep. You go to sleep, you sleep well, you wake up, you go on with your day. And sleep becomes much less of a focus because it's just this automatic thing that you expect is gonna be there because now you have confidence in [00:09:00] your ability to sleep.
And that's something that comes from once you get past insomnia is that confidence again that your body can sleep well.
So generally, sleep becomes this sort of non issue, this thing that you don't really have to focus on much in your life, and it actually can become enjoyable and peaceful and calm. You can look forward to going to sleep because sleep has been good, and you feel good when you're sleeping, and you feel good when you wake up, and it now has this very positive kind of experience to it.
Benefits of Overcoming Insomnia
And the last thing that I want to say here is sleep will generally get better over time. So once you overcome insomnia, and you get past it, and you're seeing all these benchmarks that I mentioned, the sleep quantity, quality, and the consistency that we're focusing on today. If you maintain that, and you learn how to do that when you go through the treatment for insomnia, which I'll talk about in a minute. You learn how to maintain that really good sleep over time because you learn really good skills and practices and principles around your sleep. That as long as you just continue making those a habit your sleep will get better and better [00:10:00] and better over time.
And they've done outcome studies. with, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia, or CBT-I. That's the gold standard treatment that you want to do if you have insomnia. And they track people for up to 10 years after going through that process to see, you know, did they maintain that? Did the insomnia come back?
And for up to 10 years that they've measured, they keep the insomnia away and the sleep actually gets better and better each year, because they're continuing to practice good principles of sleep and their sleep pattern gets stronger and stronger and more recovered over time.
And that's another thing that you'll see because of that consistency, the sleep just gets stronger and better quality over time.
Okay, so just to recap those things in terms of what becomes consistent, the quantity or how much you're sleeping every night is generally the same or within a very tight range. You generally are sleeping well every night, meaning the quality and the quantity of the sleep is consistent. You have good sleep basically each night over time.
You only have very occasional poor nights of sleep, you know, [00:11:00] maybe once every month or two months or when you have a stressor for a very short period, you'll have some poor sleep, but then you get right past it and back to a normal, healthy, good pattern of sleep.
You generally feel rested and restored each night and each morning when you wake up and through the day when you're having really good quality, consistent sleep.
The sleep becomes more positive as well. You feel better about your sleep. You feel peaceful about it. You start enjoying sleep more. And that's also a consistent thing. And you stop thinking about sleep that much. It just becomes a non issue in your life.
And then the last thing is that sleep will generally get better and better over time once you overcome insomnia and you maintain the basic principles around the sleep. Just good sleep habits over time to maintain it and it generally will just get stronger and better.
This is the rewards of overcoming insomnia now is getting to that place where you have this really solid consistency with your sleep that maybe you had before the insomnia.
Or maybe you never had it. Maybe you've always struggled with sleep, and this is something you've never experienced. It's obviously a very positive experience when you're [00:12:00] having this consistency in your sleep.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I)
If this is something that you want and you want to be able to get past the insomnia, the way to do it is through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia or CBT-I, which is the gold standard treatment, the first line treatment for insomnia.
And I talk about it a lot and it's the treatment that I highly recommend that you do that you do it correctly and you do it in the right way.
And I have a playlist that I've created for you. For CBT-I I'll put a link to that in the notes underneath the video and in that playlist I go over what CBT - is and what are the key skills that you want to do, that you want to make sure are in it.
And then I have a video on where you can find it and all different kinds of aspects of CBT-I so you know what the treatment involves.
But it's a wonderful treatment. It's very powerful. It works with the way your body normally sleeps. For And that's why it's so effective. And then you learn at the end, as I was saying, how to prevent relapse, how to prevent insomnia from coming back and how to maintain that good, consistent, healthy sleep over time.
Conclusion and Next Steps
So I hope you found today's video and another benefit [00:13:00] of overcoming insomnia now helpful. If you did, press the like button and you can subscribe to the channel as well. I do two of these videos every week.
I'm going to continue this series and I'm going to really highlight these benefits of overcoming insomnia and all the great things that happen when you do that, just to give you that inspiration and that motivation to get past this insomnia for good. Finally, be able to get past it and get your sleep back to a good place.
So I hope you have a good rest of your week and I will see you next time.