How I Stopped Fearing the Bad Night (and Finally Slept Better)

A few years ago, I was having trouble sleeping. A lot of trouble.

Nothing terribly unusual about that. I'm 72, and waking up in the middle of the night without being able to get back to sleep seems to come with the territory as we get older.

Knowing that didn't make it any less frustrating.

I tried the usual things. CBD, which didn't do much for me. Over-the-counter sleep aids, which I wasn't crazy about — I didn't like the idea of depending on something to sleep. And I thought I'd already handled the obvious "sleep hygiene" basics: a dark, cool bedroom, no late caffeine, a regular bedtime.

And yet, I still wasn't sleeping well. And, if my social media feeds are a reliable sample, a lot of other people out there have the same problem. They're reading/posting in the middle of the night. Sharing their experience with over-the-counter and some off-label prescription sleep meds. It wasn't sounding good. Scary in fact.

Then I Discovered Sleep Reset

Sleep Reset is an app-based sleep program, developed by scientists from Yale and Stanford, built around CBT-I — Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia, widely considered the gold standard for treating chronic sleep trouble.

I've used it, on and off, for a couple of years now. I'll work through it for a while, take a break, and come back when I feel like my sleep could use a reset. For me, it works.

One thing I appreciate is the accountability. Every morning, I fill out a quick report on the previous night's sleep. It only takes a couple of minutes, but there's something useful about actually stopping to think through what happened, instead of just deciding, "Well, that was a terrible night — today's probably going to be a disaster." I also have a monthly virtual check-in with a sleep coach, where we talk through what's working, what isn't, and what to adjust.

What surprised me most, though, was how much I learned.

What is insomnia exactly?

First things first, let's define the problem. The occasional lousy night isn't insomnia. According to The Cleveland Clinic, insomnia is a sleep disorder that makes it hard to fall asleep or stay asleep throughout the night. For some people, insomnia is an inconvenience. For others, it can be a major disruption. It has several causes.

Roughly, 1 in 3 adults worldwide have insomnia symptoms. About 10% of adults have chronic (long-term) insomnia, which lasts at least three months.

• Acute insomnia: Short-term sleep trouble that lasts for days or weeks, often caused by stress or a major life event.

• Chronic insomnia: Long-term sleep trouble that happens at least three times a week and lasts for three months or more. [1, 2]

Some of the Advice Seemed Completely Backwards

I thought I knew a fair amount about sleep. Apparently, I didn't.

Instead of encouraging me to spend more time in bed trying to catch up, the Sleep Reset program initially pushed me to limit my time in bed and extend my waking hours. Yikes. That was hard.

It also taught me that if I'm lying awake and clearly not drifting off, I should get up. That sounded crazy at first — it's two in the morning, it's dark, I desperately want to sleep, and the advice is to get out of bed?

But there's a reason for it. I didn't want my brain to start associating the bed with lying awake, worrying about sleep, watching the hours tick by. Bed is for sleeping. If sleep isn't happening, get up, do something quiet, and go back when you're actually sleepy.

At first, these rules took real effort. Now they're pretty much hard-wired.

Then There Are the Sleep Myths

I'd absorbed a lot of ideas about sleep over the years that turned out to be wrong. That you can train yourself to thrive on five hours a night. That alcohol helps you rest. That snoring is always harmless. That one bad night will do lasting damage to your health.

The biggest one, for me, was the idea that you absolutely need eight hours or else. It turns out sleep quality matters as much as — maybe more than — the hour count. Now, when I don't get as many hours as I'd like, I know I can still get through the day: I'll be productive, I'll have enough energy. That knowledge alone has taken a lot of pressure off.

And the myth about one rough night causing lasting harm? Believing that only adds anxiety, which is exactly what disrupts sleep in the first place.

The Biggest Change: I'm No Longer Afraid of a Bad Night

I still have bad nights. Of course I do. I suspect I always will.

The difference is that a bad night no longer feels like a catastrophe. That might be the single most valuable thing Sleep Reset taught me.

If I wake up after a lousy night, I now know something I didn't really believe before: I'll get through the day just fine. Maybe I won't be at my absolute best. Maybe I'll be tired. But I don't have to spend the night dreading it, and I don't have to spend the next evening worrying it'll happen again — because worrying about whether you'll sleep is a remarkably effective way to stay awake.

The program also gave me a framework for thinking through why a bad night happens. Was something on my mind? Did my routine change? Did I spend too much time in bed? Sometimes there's a clear explanation. Sometimes there isn't. And that's okay too.

I find that logging my sleep helps to keep me 'honest' and accountable ... and I can also see longer term trends.

The Sleep Reset app includes a number of helpful tools to help you craft a better nights' sleep.

Sleep Isn't Something You Can Force

That might be the real lesson here.

For years, when I couldn't sleep, my instinct was to try harder: stay in bed, close my eyes, tell myself tomorrow would be awful if I didn't get back to sleep right now. That cycle fed a kind of performance anxiety that just made everything worse.

CBT-I taught me almost the opposite. You create the conditions for sleep. You build habits that help your brain understand when and where sleep happens. And then you get out of the way and trust the process. You stop treating one lousy night as proof that something's gone terribly wrong.

I wouldn't say Sleep Reset has made me a perfect sleeper. I don't think there's such a thing.

What it's done is make me a much more confident sleeper.

At this point in my life, I think that's even better.

BTW: I was talking to my Sleep Coach the other day about the stress that people in our local area (Reno, Nevada) are going through because of the terrible wildfires ... and mentioned that a few friends had told me that they were "operating on fumes ... not getting any sleep". She said that's completely normal ... that they're in 'survival mode'. But, then they have a greater chance of carrying those survival mechanisms over to their lives after they recover from the fires ... and that can result in a real problem of insomnia.