Waking up and feeling like I haven't slept at all is just the worst feeling,
and then I'm worried about not getting the right amount of sleep the next night.
So last night I managed to get three hours sleep.
Your mind starts playing out all these scenarios of how awful your next day's going to be.
Sorry!
This is Abigail. She's had insomnia for six years.
It's highly professional, this.
We've brought her to a bed shop, naturally, to have a chat about her sleep and get some advice
from Dr Alanna Hare, who's a sleep consultant at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London.
An estimated 16 million of us in the UK suffer from insomnia.
Which, by the way, happens to be a mental health condition all of its own. (Mental Health Foundation 2011)
So on Like Minds this week we're talking about shut-eye and your mental health.
What exactly is insomnia? Why is not getting your eight hours sleep affecting your mood?
And we've got some ace advice coming up to help you if you're struggling to nod off at night.
The term insomnia is simply about the difficulty sleeping, what that actually means
to the individual can be really quite different.
We know that there is no mental health problem that is not in some way associated with sleep.
Even in individuals who don't have a mental health problem to start off with,
they can start to experience some of the symptoms of depression and anxiety
as a consequence of their sleep problem.
So tell me about your sleep.
I don't sleep much and when I do it's for very short amounts of time.
And then I'm up really, really early and just can't get back to sleep
which means I'm irritable in the day, which means everything else is terrible.
We asked Abigail to write down all the things she does in bed at night.
What's really interesting about this list, Abigail, is two things I'm not seeing on here
are the two things that I would say you can do in bed,
and that is sleeping and intimate relations with your partner.
Stimulus control is around about making sure that when you get into bed,
your brain goes, "Oh, I'm in bed now, it must be time to go to sleep."
As soon as you start doing these other activities: eating, drinking, emailing,
your brain doesn't associate bed so strongly with sleep,
and you're more likely to therefore continue to struggle to sleep.
If it really has to happen in the bed just because of a space thing,
make sure the bed is fully made up and you're up and you're in a work or an eating position.
Top Sleep Tips
For some reason I keep waking up around like, 4:00, 4:15. Like consistently.
It is normal to have brief wakings at night and the reason for that is we cycle in sleep through
light sleep, deep sleep and REM sleep which is the dreaming sleep.
These cycles occur roughly every 90 minutes. What that means is every 90 minutes or so,
you will come into a lighter sleep and even into full wakefulness.
But in people who don't struggle with their sleep, they just go, "Hmm", turn over and go back to sleep.
But what happens to people when they struggle with their sleep,
is that these wakeful periods become imbued with this huge significance.
Assuming you're going to bed at roughly the same time every night,
you will come into wakefulness at those particular times during the night.
You should then be able to drop back off to sleep, and one of the reasons you're not doing that
is because you start to worry.
If I'm next to my girlfriend and I turn around and she's happily asleep which is heartbreaking
because she wakes up so happy and I'm not impressed.
It is nice to hear that it's normal.
This is what you guys had to say about your sleepless nights and how you deal with them.
I'm running on empty today.
Shifting your mindset on what is enough sleep for you.
Now, rather than think, "Oh my gosh, five hours, it's not enough,"
I think to myself, "Wow, I've still got five hours that I can be here in bed and I don't have to do anything."
A lot of people that struggle with mindfulness, overthink it.
The thing I love about the colouring books, it's about finding the simplicity
of what you're doing, your everyday stuff.
When I haven't slept I just feel really low, and waking up in the morning
and it doesn't even feel like I've been sleeping, and I get to work, then there are meetings
and I literally just don't want to speak to anyone.
Is there a reason why your mood is really low or affected when you don't sleep?
It's much more difficult to navigate social relationships when you've not had enough sleep.
You don't just become low in mood but you become quite unpredictable in your mood.
There's an emotional structure in the brain it's called the Amygdala,
when we don't get enough sleep, that emotional brain is allowed to run away a bit,
because the front part of the brain that normally puts the brake on our slightly erratic emotions
is less able to to talk effectively to that emotional part of the brain.
So we become more angry, a bit more snappy.
Are naps bad?
There'll be some nights where I literally don't sleep until like three or four in the morning,
and then I'll get to work, eat a heavy lunch and at four o'clock I'm ready to sleep.
That four o'clock slump, there's a biological explanation for that.
The longer you've been awake for, the higher the drive to sleep.
I try and think about naps as a bit like, with small children,
who haven't really been eating their meals, and when they're a bit hungry you give them a snack,
and then guess what then they don't eat the next meal either, but then they're really hungry
a few hours later so you give them a snack. And it just goes on and on and on.
If you're not sleeping at night because of insomnia,
don't snack on your naps in the daytime, it's not a good plan.
There is of course an exception to this rule. You should have a nap if you're sleep deprived
and you have to do something that's dangerous if you're not awake: like driving a car.
In that case, 20 to 30 minutes is enough to be refreshing and avoid feeling groggy.
And have a tea or a coffee to boost your alertness.
Often those worries and anxieties about both the sleep itself
and what it means for you the next day in terms of your work and so on,
they start to be the main reason your sleep continues to be troublesome.
How do you stop those thoughts though? Because as soon as you worry about one thing,
it just keeps going.
Scheduling in this "worry time" but well away from bed time,
can be another really useful way of reducing the power of those thoughts.
Write down the worries that are otherwise taking up your time at night.
If you say to yourself, "My worry time is at 12:30,
for half an hour so if the thoughts start to come, I will deal with that, in that prescribed time."
What sorts of things have you tried?
I feel like I've given up trying, I'm not going to lie.
Like I tell myself I'm trying to sleep but I'll literally lie down with my phone and I know that's bad.
Here are some more tips if, like Abigail, you feel like you've tried everything.
When you start to feel that sleep is not round the corner, take it out of the bedroom.
At least take it out of the bed. Set that place up before you go to bed, so it's comfortable.
And in that space, I usually recommend some type of relaxation,
something that's just going to help you turn off those thoughts.
And then when you start to feel sleepy again, only at that point you go back to bed.
This thing about trying to sleep, this effortful sleep is the enemy of sleep.
If you try really hard to stay awake, because you've switched off that effort to sleep,
you actually will find that sleep comes a little bit easier.
Clock watching is the worst thing when you can't sleep.
It just makes you really worried about the fact that it's now
five o'clock in the morning and you don't feel you've slept.
So I like to get clocks out of the room entirely.
That lack of energy means that particularly what often drops off
is things like exercise. The problem with that is what we know about exercise
is it really increases the drive to sleep.
The most important thing is that kind of attitude of
trying to feel as positive about it as you can and trying to take control of it in some way.
Sleep is obviously a really personal thing and you might have found some great tips that help you.
Let us know in the comments below, because you never know, it might just help somebody else.
For insomnia that lasts a month or less, your GP might be able to give you some sleeping pills
but if it goes on longer than a month, cognitive behavioural therapy
is one of the most effective treatments.