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Comment by m0nty | Hacker News Reader

I share that frustration. Also the assumption that increasing sleep time by 10% would be helpful - 10% of zero is still zero. My last marathon of chronic insomnia was 96 hours without sleep. Not being restless in bed, but just not sleeping at all. I'm about to start CBT for this but I'm skeptical, given that it's related to a medical problem for which I'm still awaiting treatment.

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I laughed when he said he was helped by seeing his "bad" night was one hour less than his targeted 7.

I can go 4 or 5 days a week not going to sleep before 4 AM and I am at work by 7 AM. I can also go 3 or 4 days waking up every hour on the hour and take 20 or 30 minutes to go back to sleep.

Most people don't know I am that tired thankfully.

I got five hours last night, I'm grateful. I try to hide it from others but that's tricky when you can't stay awake at your desk :-}

Honest question... why not just get some sort of excuse to be able to sleep at those times when you are ready to sleep. Sure it might be during "working hours" but if that is when your mind decides it wants to sleep then for purely health reasons doesn't it make sense to seize that moment and sleep? Would you sleep for hours at that time or would you just wake up in an hour? Either way I can see scenarios where this could work.

That would be an awesome thing to be allowed to do. Outside of high workload Asian offices I haven't heard of sleeping during hours was anything but firing material.

I can sometimes get 20 minutes at work but there are few private places where this is possible. I got a 10 minute nap once and woke to find two very concerned people wondering if I'd had a heart attack or something!

If you haven't experienced insomnia it is, like most maladies, far more complex and difficult than you might imagine. Everyone has a suggestion or two, but it differs for each individual and has a multitude of causes (as I hinted, in my case a heart problem plus various complications from that, which I hope to get sorted soon).

Every time I've looked back on a period when I've woken up every hour on the hour, I find that I was under untenable stress levels. Just a thought.

It's been since I was 15. I have gone through a sister and a son having terminal cancer and I don't notice a difference when I was in high stress or low stress. Just frustrating.

Did you miss where the article says "In this way, unless exacerbated by physical causes — like sleep apnea or restless leg syndrome — insomnia is a condition of the mind that then infects the body. "

It's a minor aside in the second last paragraph of the piece. The rest of the article is written in a way the presents insomnia as a psychological matter.

For most people it is a psychological problem and for those people it was being unsuitably managed. Obviously that's not true for everyone.

CBT is also used in some patients who experience pain as a result of cancer.

Sometimes CBT is about fixing the problem; sometimes it's about helping someone cope better with a problem.

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