I had insomnia at the beginning of year 11. I think it was stress, because I also had nightmares when I did go to sleep. It was just so frustrating and irritating to need to sleep but not be able to. I did a lot of pacing (didn't help!
). Fortunately for me, it passed fairly quickly.
This is a really effective CBT strategy for insomnia, that might work for you [img]smile.gif[/img]
One thing you could look at doing is keeping a sleep diary. Recording when you go to bed (as in start trying to go to sleep), how long it takes to go to sleep (obviously this will be an estimate), how long you sleep, how many times you wake up during the night, what time you finally get up. Then work out how long you spend in bed asleep, and how long in bed not asleep. This will help you get a handle on exactly what is going on (because people often underestimate how much sleep they are actually getting), and also what your general sleep cycle is. Also record what sort of things you are doing to overcome daytime sleepiness, e.g., caffeine, daytime naps, etc.
Basically, when you have insomnia, you need to reset your sleep/wake cycle so it is very steady and there aren't a lot of deviations to it. It's a really bad idea, for instance, to try to catch up on sleep you've missed during the week on the weekend, even though most people do it. So stopping all things that are strategies against daytime sleepiness are the first key.
So, when you've worked out what your sleeping patterns actually are, the strategy is sleep restriction. This sounds paradoxical, but the aim is to maximise the amount of time you spend sleeping while you're actually in bed. So you start by setting a non-changing rise time. No matter how much sleep you've gotten the night before, you always get up at the same time. This helps your body gets its sleep-wake cycle back on track. Then you set a going to bed time. This should be quite a bit less than what your usual go to bed time is, or used to be before you started getting insomnia. The aim is to have you sleep when you're in bed, but be tired the next day so when you go to sleep the next night, you'll be more likely to sleep. Then each night or couple of nights, you adjust the bed time by about 15 minutes, until you reach your ideal bed time (e.g., 8 hours before rise time). If you can't get to sleep within 15 minutes, get up and do something. Similarly if you wake up during the night and can't get back to sleep within 15 minutes. You'll be pretty tired the first week or so, but it's not something that works straight away, but it does work the best.