So how's the insomnia cure going?

It's early to tell for sure, but the sleep restriction cognitive behavior therapy I've been trying does seem to be helping.  I am usually able to sleep the whole night through with 4 or 5 awakenings.  These are usually fairly short.  But I"m still often getting less than five hours a night, and naps aren't permitted.  But I do feel well about how things are going.

They say you shouldn't try this on your own; you should be supervised by a therapist.  Then they say good luck finding a therapist.  There aren't many of them.  So I'm doing it on my own.

I have graduated from phase 1 to phase 2.  Phase 1 had me going to bed at midnight even though I was unable to sleep beyond 5 a.m.  I'd been going to bed at 8:30 or 9 to find time during the night to get more sleep.  But I've found that, in the end, I get no more sleep by going to be so early.

The first week of going to bed at midnight (phase 1) was just awful, but I was amazed on night 6 when I actually stopped waking up at 2 or 3.  So after a week in phase 1, I rolled my bed time back to 11.  (My goal is to form a habit of going to bed at 10 and waking up at 5.  This seems doable.)  I'm still getting up earlier than I would like, but only once have I awakened around 3 and been unable to get back to sleep.  

I'm using my Fitbit along with the CBT-i Coach app to track my sleep.  The app creates a nice graph to show my progress ... or lack thereof.  

I'm not ready to graduate to phase 3.  I'd like at least a full week of sleeping through the night and awakening at 5 or later.  (Too often I'm fully awake at about 4:30 or so.)  Then I think I can roll my bed time back to 10.  The concept is that I'm creating a habit of sleeping to 5 regardless of bed time.  And because I was so sleep-deprived when I went to bed in phase 1, I seem to have broke the habit of awakening at 2 every night.  

So why am I having this problem when I'd been able to sleep nicely throughout most of my life?  According to Dr. Matthew Walker in his book Why We Sleep, the control center for our sleep is atrophying as we age and becoming more easily confused.  With neurodegnerative diseases, like Alzheimer's disease, this atrophy is accelerated.  So people in memory care are walking the halls all night.  The double-whammy is that poor sleep accelerates Alzheimer's disease.

I am optimistic about this.  Maybe I'm just getting used to surviving on 5 hours of sleep, but I feel well enough during the day, and I seem to be fully functional.  I look forward to feeling comfortable about rolling bed time back to 10.