Reddit reviews Say Good Night to Insomnia: The Six-Week, Drug-Free Program Developed At Harvard Medical School

I consider myself relatively cured of sleep issues. Not perfect but livable.

1: How long did you have Insomnia and how bad was it?
I had it for a year

2. How much hours sleep did you get a night when you had Insomnia? 0-5

3. What's the longest time you haven't been without any sleep?
1 week

4. How long is your Insomnia cured right now? Since June this year. I considered myself cured because I have never had a single sleepless night since. However, my sleep is not perfect still. I would get a good run of 7-8 hours/night of sleep for two weeks, then a bad patch of 3-5 hours/night of sleep for a few days.

5. Do you sleep like a normal person now? I do when I'm in a good run. In bad patches, I up my game and bring out all the props, lol.

6. Are you still worried you'll get Insomnia again? Yes. Still trying to wean off the horrors that I experienced from catastrophizing for a year, but the worry is getting less and less each day.

7. How did you cure your Insomnia? I tried a lot of things, but the following worked the best:

1. Self-administered treatments of CBTI with some SRT and ACT thrown in.
   
2. light therapy (30 min of lightbox in the morning + avoid bright blue lights in the evening)
   
3. walks early in the evening to suppress anxiety
   
4. eating graham crackers and some water before going to bed has reduced nighttime awakenings
   
5. listening to Sleep With Me (podcast) allows me to distract myself from worrisome thoughts when I'm in bed
   
   8. What were your worst experiences with Insomnia? After a week without sleep everything hurts and it's hard to perform at work. Before I discovered CBTI I was catastrophizing eveyday and I would have suicidal thoughts.
   
   9. Any extra tips you want to give to everybody with Insomnia?
   
   

• Sleep issues are different for everyone, if something that somebody else is raving about does not work for you, it doesn't mean your issues are worse or that the other guy is lying, you just have to keep trying other things until you find something that works for you.
  
  
• It seems CBTI and light therapy will help the vast majority of people regardless of their unique condition. Note, I said help, not directly address the root cause. At some point in my search for a cure, I realized that it was futile to look for a root cause (unless you do have a medical condition that could be diagnosed, but my doctor could not find any with me), and realized that whatever triggered my initial sleeplessness was irrelevant and I was just making it worse by worrying too much about it. With CBTI, I have learned to realize that I cannot force myself to sleep. The best I can do is to be ready for sleep when it comes. When sleep comes and I am not relaxed or am anxious, then I will not be able to go to sleep. So I must do everything I can to be ready to catch sleep when it comes.
  
  
• I realized that my sleep issues started happening when I lost the ability to sleep out of my ideal sleep window. Everybody has a Circadian Rhythm, where the sleep pressure is strongest in the late afternoon and in the evening (the "ideal sleep window"). After I figured this out I stopped trying to sleep outside of this window. Doing so for me would induce insomnia. There is a good article that explains this: https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/sleep#Curing_DSPS_and_insomnia
  
  
  
• As much as possible, avoid labeling yourself as an insomniac, you have to believe that you are normal (and you most likely are) and you're only suffering sleep issues. Do not underestimate the power of the human mind - if you believe in something it will eventually come true, so be careful what you believe in. Being through so many forums, I met one guy who successfully cured his 20 yr insomnia and the advice he gave was probably the one that inspired me the most: after a bad night or even a row of bad nights, do everything in your power to feel good all the time, and good sleep will eventually follow, even if you have to fake it until you make it. There are only a handful of people in the world who truly cannot sleep, and those are the ones who suffer from Fatal Familial Insomnia. So unless you have that, you will eventually conk out at some point, so just try to be positive until that happens. Put sleep in the right perspective - pay no attention to it and just trust that it will take care of itself - and put your waking life on center stage.
  
  
• I think one of the reasons why people who got cured never get back here is that completely blocking out the thought of insomnia also helps in keeping it from happening again. Forums such as this can act as "triggers" for relapse. I know I'm guilty of coming back here, but only because I'm in a bad patch right now :-). So try to avoid articles about sleep when you can, especially if your sleep is getting better already. Also, avoid blog posts about "the dangers of sleep deprivation" etc. Those are the worst triggers. And the literature is probably nonsense anyway, the writers just try to make the stories as dramatic as possible to attract people.
  
  
• Here are the books that helped me:
  
  
• https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_24?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=desperately+seeking+snoozing&sprefix=desperately+seeking+snoo%2Cmobile%2C180&crid=37RG1MR1JC6XM
  A book written by a fellow sufferer and how he used Sleep Restriction Therapy to improve his condition.
  
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Say-Good-Night-Insomnia-Drug-Free-ebook/dp/B005CW6T8S/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1511820975&sr=8-1&keywords=say+goodnight+to+insomnia
  The official book on CBTI.
  
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Sleep-Book-Well-Every-Night/dp/1499250533/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1511821229&sr=8-2&keywords=the+sleep+book
  A book that helped me address the sleep anxiety that was confounding my sleep issues.
  

The book "Say Goodnight to Insomnia" by Gregg Jacobs is a step-by-step explanation of how to do CBT-i for yourself without a therapist. It's $1.99 right now for Kindle.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005CW6T8S/

The kindle version was $1.99 very recently, but is apparently up to $9.99 now. Paperback is actually cheaper now.