Fear of breaking a good sleep pattern

“I'm sleeping better right now...so I don’t need to work on sleep."

Is it REALLY better? Or, are you scared to mess with it for fear of losing the good sleep you got for a few nights? If you’ve been through this cycle of good/bad/good sleep and are fearful, then you don’t fully understand the process of sleep.

Believe it or not, the underlying physiological and behavioral mechanisms of sleep work together in very predictable ways that everyone can learn. If you wrack up enough of a sleep deficit, then you will also inevitably have some good nights of sleep that follow it. If you don’t understand how to regulate your body’s sleep pattern, those precious good nights will also be followed by bad nights of sleep, too. That is just the way that the body works.

The typical cycle is that people will have some poor nights of sleep, fuel the difficulties in the following nights with worry about the lack of sleep and lying in bed awake, crash at some point during the week into some good nights of sleep, and then oversleep in order to “make up” for lost sleep. That “make up” night(s) results in not having enough of something called “sleep drive,” which is part of the essential pieces to have a good night of sleep after that “make up" sleep. Then, the cycle repeats.

Sound familiar? One solid step to reducing sleep problems is to reduce your “sleeping in” after a bad night of sleep. This sounds simple, but it’s pretty hard to do when you are cozy in bed. This is why I work with people on sleep; we use data, specific formulas, and eliminate the guesswork in sleep decisions. If you understand sleep, you know how to break the good sleep and bring it back again.

Want to know more? Read about our sleep trainings and CBT-I.

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