Scared

I was just experiencing this the past week. Having multiple nights without getting a wink of sleep. I’d just sit there and try for hours on end and felt miserable! It created such distress which contributed to me continuing to sleep poorly. A viscous cycle. I’m so sorry you’re experiencing that. But I promise you can handle not getting enough sleep. It might suck, you might feel like crap and not perform at your full capacity, but eventually you WILL sleep. Stressing about getting enough sleep will only make it harder. Just try to embrace the lack of sleep and tell yourself, you’ll sleep when you sleep and you can handle it if you don’t. Sucks but you GOT THIS❤️ think of those navy seals doin hell week on basically no sleep. You’re in your ~seal era~

I used to get awful sleep anxiety and found all of the routines and wind down, no TVs etc actually made it worse for me, kind of like performance anxiety. Basically I'd do all of the right stuff and still not sleep because the pressure to then sleep because I'd done everything 'right' meant I made myself worse. What helped me most was going OK, if I'm not going to get some sleep, what else can I use that time in bed for. I'd keep the lights off as if I were going to sleep and just use the time to think on other things, dream holidays, how I'd spend lottery winnings, interior design of my house etc knowing that not sleeping for a while happens to us all. Once I took the pressure out of it, sleep came and if it didn't, it didn't matter.

Hi there- I totally understand what you mean. For me fearing not sleeping and then going into an OCD flare up as a result is very scary for me as well. A few things that have helped me: 1. Moving around/exercising, 2. Journalling with specific goals, 3. Medication and 4. Boundaries on my time meaning I don’t over schedule myself and make sure I leave plenty of time to wind down. Good Luck.

Hi there. Many people with OCD and even without OCD become super worried about the lack of sleep that they begin to focus on that and as such, it becomes a road block to actually sleeping. You should get in the habit of setting up healthy sleep hygiene. No screens or TVs before bed for at least two hours, try to go to bed at the same time each night to develop consistency, and perhaps take a nice, warm bath before going to bed. You may also want to look up handouts for CBT and Insomnia, which can help direct you towards healthy thinking patterns towards sleep. The more you think about your non-sleep, the more of a hold it will take over in your mind. The key is to adopt a neutral stance towards sleep. Hope that helps somewhat. If you're in bed, and cannot sleep, get out of bed and do something boring in another room. You dont want to associate your bedroom with lack of sleep; you want to only associate it with good sleep.

Z Quil might help??