snuginarug wrote:robysue, thank you for your input and support. You were posting the exact moment I was! Yes, I've been told to avoid the lying in bed trying to sleep thing, and enacting that has helped my feelings of anger and frustration, which are not conducive to sleep. I've never been able to get to sleep when pissed off.
Yep, it's also important to not lie in bed when
angry or
frustrated. That was one of the (new) rules imposed on me by the PA I'm working with for my own insomnia issues. Hubby gets to enforce it. Fortunately the number of days I have to get out of bed because I've lost my temper at the BiPAP and/or the Lamictral (migraine medicine) and/or the insomnia itself has dropped by quite a bit since starting my CBT for the insomnia.
You say that for years you sleep on a schedule that was roughly 2:00 AM to 10:AM, and that the new (unacceptable) pattern of waking up at roughly 6:00AM started about 3 years ago. Does that roughly correspond to when you started to feel fully adjusted to sleeping with the CPAP? In other words, did the "wake up too soon" insomnia start AFTER your sleep apnea was under control by consistent use of your CPAP with good AHI numbers? Or did the "wake up too soon" insomnia start BEFORE you were diagnosed with sleep apnea?
And now you find yourself waking up at 6:00 AM and unable to get back to sleep. I know I suggested it before: How light is your room at 6:00? Even if the ambient light hasn't bothered you in the past, it's possible that your bedroom is now simply too light for you to get back to sleep. Blackout shades or curtains can be used to solve that problem.
But another issue might be worrying too much about the
clock: How much do you focus (intentionally or unintentionally) on the
clock when you are waking up too early to start your day, but find yourself unable to get back to sleep in a timely fashion? Is the clock the very first thing you look at when you wake up? And is your first response to what you see on the clock something along the lines of "Oh God, not another morning where I'm awake at 6:00 AM? I wonder if I'll ever get back to sleep today?" Because this kind of behavior is also quite capable of keeping your insomnia monster fat and well fed.
And the first step to ending the "worrying about the
clock" problem is to get rid of the clock and
anything else your mind can use to accurately estimate the time. So I would suggest that you move the clock somewhere where you cannot see it from the bed when you first wake up---preferably somewhere where you can't see it at all from the bed. And get some blackout shades/curtains. So that your room looks more or less the same at 2:00AM, 4:00AM, 6:00AM, 8:00AM and 10:00AM. As silly as this sounds, not being able to identify the time when you wake up really helps you not to worry about the time you wake up and that in turn helps re-establish that it's still time to be asleep in your mind as well as your body, which in turn makes it easier to get back to sleep .....
Re napping: I know that not napping didn't work out for you, but your psychologist was suggesting a standard approach to trying to make your body sleepy enough to sleep the whole night through. But as you mention, you can't give up napping because it aggravates the bipolar symptoms. So some relevant questions: How long do you nap each day?
And when do you take your naps? If the naps are excessively long or too late in the day, that can create problems with sleeping through the night. Since you can't give up naps entirely, can you at least restrict the length or time of the naps?
For example, could you function with one one-hour long nap that ends before 5pm?
Finally, you might want to pick up a copy of
Sound Sleep, Sound Mind by Dr. Barry Krakow.