That insomnia cure...

So my brother reminds me that I need to update you on my experiment with sleep restriction cognitive behavior therapy for insomnia.  I last posted about it on July 9, but I've been slow with followup reports on its progress.  Long story short, it hasn't been the silver bullet I hoped for.

They warn you not to try it on your own.  You should have a coach, which I believe is necessary to maintain discipline in the process.  You will recall that the process is quite unpleasant.  But, then, they also point out that there are very few sleep coaches out there, and I didn't find one locally.  

Would things have gone better if I'd worked under the supervision of a coach?  Probably. Should I give it another shot?  Maybe, but not now.

Early on in the process, I believed that it was going reasonably well, and I felt I had some latitude with the protocol.  I had been trying to go to bed at midnight and wake up naturally at 5 a.m. for a week, but I couldn't really keep that up.  And I wasn't able to sleep all the way to 5.  So I was getting about four and a half hours of sleep a night, and the protocol forbids naps.

I decided to call it good enough for the first week of the protocol, and so moved my bed time to 11.  That kind of worked out OK, and I would sometimes get a reasonably continuous five or six hours.  I was supposed to do that for a whole week, but I shifted to a 10 o'clock bed time in less than a week.  And I actually protracted things by going off and on the protocol a time or two due to circumstances.

I did hit a point where I thought I had made a lot of progress, but then we had a trip to the East Coast ... three time zones away.  If that wasn't bad enough, Amy and I both managed to get covid on the trip, causing further disruption in my sleep schedule.

The whole concept behind cognitive behavior therapy for insomnia is to teach your brain habits about when to go to sleep and when to wake up.  If your schedule shifts three hours two times in one week, well that confuses the training.  

I may have mentioned before that when I got covid during the summer of 2022, it actually worked out to my benefit.  It was a very mild case (for me ... not so much for Amy), but it caused me to have three nights in a row of uninterrupted sleep.  I woke up each morning feeling great, and I only dealt with a mild fever the three afternoons. 

So this time, when Amy got it (probably in an airport), and it was clear I'd be getting it too, I thought I'd have a replay of 2022.  Well, not quite.  While it was still a relatively mild case, it was very disruptive to my sleep, especially since it fell right into the time when I was trying to adjust for the time zone changes.

I'm still trying to stabilize my sleep schedule from our trip.  My neurologist suggested a higher dose of melatonin, which I've been trying.  In Beating the Dementia Monster, we noted that both my sleep doctor and the well known sleep researcher, Dr. Matthew Walker, consider melatonin to be a placebo with respect to insomnia.  My extensive experimentation with it seemed to confirm that.  But using the higher dose recommended by my neurologist seems to help a little on some nights.

We have a trip to visit family in Hawaii later this month, and that's three time zones in the other direction.  We'll be there two weeks before returning home.  So how's that going to work out?

I'm hoping that when I'm over the repercussions of our trip and the covid infection that I'll get back to some reasonable sleep schedule, even if it involves two or three periods of sleep each night.  If that happens and remains stable for a while, maybe I'll try the sleep restriction therapy again.  Maybe.