My Sleepio experiment - a turning point?
Breaking news - perhaps not...
Last Friday Sleepio, the CBTI (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia) app I’ve been testing made it onto the front page of The Times with the news that the NHS is to start prescribing it rather than sleeping pills. The paper asked me to write a piece about my experience using the app, and that appeared on Monday.
Luckily, the call from The Times came at a key moment in the Sleepio course, one which the cartoon Prof described as “the big one.” The third of his online tutorials instructs you in how to plan a sleep schedule built on one of the course’s rather counterintuitive principles, sleep restriction.
I ended up choosing a window of 11pm to 5 am and began following the strict instructions to not get into bed early, winding down in another room, and then leap out of bed promptly at 5. When I wrote the article between 5 and 7 on Saturday morning I was very cautiously optimistic. The first few days of my new regime had seen me asleep for about five hours a night - the same as previously. But there had been a big improvement in my sleep efficiency, the proportion of time in bed which I spent asleep. My average for the week rose to 81%, and on one night hitting the target rate of 90%.
Since then there has been more improvement. Saturday night into Sunday morning was tricky - a theatre trip and transport chaos meant I didn’t get to bed until midnight and there was a brief interruption from a granddaughter’s nightmare but I still managed almost five hours asleep.
Then I woke on Monday to a new record - over 5 hours and 96% efficiency! I fell asleep almost instantly at 11 and then had just a brief awakening in the night, before leaping up soon after 5 to make tea for my wife before she caught an early train to her university job. It seemed like a turning point……
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It is now 0530 on Tuesday morning and I am downstairs in front of my laptop again. That would be fine if, having got to bed at 11pm I had slept through until 5 am. Instead, I woke at 2.45, drifted in and out of light sleep for a while before deciding at 4.30 that I’d had more than my permitted 15 minutes staring at the ceiling. I moved to another room and had finished reading an engrossing memoir by the time my smartphone alarm told me it was time to get up. I dutifully filled in my sleep diary and found it had been a 3 out of 10 kind of night as compared with the 7 I had scored the night before.
Ah well, nobody said it would be easy. I am halfway through the Sleepio course and about to embark on the Prof’s fourth online session. I remain hopeful that it will make a real difference.
I’ll be back in a week with another update.
There are so many things that others proffer, as a perhaps helpful suggestion, when you have apprised them of your problem.Some actually may succeed, or seem that they ought to do so ,based upon their near- legendary ingredients.Does the Research Protocol permit you to use or partake of the putative beneficial items,in the hope that one or more may be more efficacious than ceiling-staring? I was thinking of mentioning imbibing a wee dram or two, or if one is so lucky as to have the benefits of having a compliant wife within reach, to actually attempt amorous activities which cause orgasmic relief if correctly applied by you to her (or by her to you, if you are so incredibly fortunate, and hope does eternally spring forth). Or you could each quaff that wee dram of which I made previous mention, and then another. That regimen might help you both in attaining the benefits which accrue from actually trying the amorous cooperative activities earlier mentioned.
Let us know, please, of your further efforts to be embraced in the arms of Morpheus.
Great topic. Thanks for your post.