Sleep and CBT have suddenly become something very concrete for me. For many years, I believed I was simply the kind of person who wakes up at five in the morning, but during the past week I have started questioning that truth.
🇬🇧 English version
🇸🇪 Svenska Jag trodde att jag bara kunde sova till fem
For many years, I have gotten up at five.
Not because someone woke me up. Not because an alarm clock went off.
I simply woke up.
And because I was awake, I thought:
Well, then the morning has started.
So I got up.
Day after day.
Year after year.
Eventually, it almost became part of my identity.
I am someone who wakes up early. I cannot sleep past five.
It did not even feel like a thought anymore.
It felt like a fact.
The doctor was not wrong – but I did something with those words
Many years ago, a doctor told me that I had a sleep disturbance.
The doctor was not wrong.
What happened was that, over time, I turned that information into something bigger.
“I have a sleep disturbance” became “I cannot sleep any longer. This is simply how my body works.”
Those are two very different things.
I accepted that I woke up early.
Five o’clock was my morning.
End of story.
I never really wondered whether that part of the pattern could be influenced.
A few days ago, I tried moving my morning
I recently wrote about trying to sleep longer and move my morning from five o’clock.
The idea was quite simple:
I am not allowed to get up before six.
Even that felt like a big change for me.
When I looked at a full year of my Garmin data, I saw that my average wake-up time was around 5:23 a.m. and that, for a long time, I had been sleeping considerably less than my estimated sleep need.
So I started staying in bed.
And do you know what?
I could sleep until six.
I could have stopped there.
Okay. Apparently, I can sleep until six.
But then another thought appeared.
How do you know six is the limit?
That was when something shifted in me.
I almost started talking back to my own thought.
Okay, Carina. Now you are saying that you can sleep until six.
But how do you know six is the end point?
Have you actually tried staying in bed after six?
Are you completely sure that this is the absolute truth?
And the answer was:
No.
I did not actually know.
So I stayed in bed.
And I fell asleep again.
And suddenly it was seven o’clock.
When I started thinking about sleep and CBT together, I realised that I was using the same questions I had previously used in connection with other fears.
Sleep and CBT – my old tools came back
I went through CBT perhaps 15 or 20 years ago.
Those tools have stayed with me ever since, but I have mainly used them in connection with my fear of dirt.
That is where I learned not to automatically treat every thought or feeling as a fact.
I can stop.
Investigate.
Ask:
What do I believe right now?
How do I know that it is true?
Is there anything that speaks against it?
What happens if I do something differently?
I am beginning to understand that sleep and CBT are connected for me through one very simple question:
How do I know that what I believe is true?
The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare describes CBT as a treatment in which thoughts, emotions and behaviours are connected, and where people can practise new ways of thinking and acting.
👉 Read more about CBT at the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare
The strange thing is that I have had these tools for so many years.
But I have never thought about using them on my sleep.
Perhaps this is exactly where sleep and CBT meet for me: not in thinking away a real problem, but in examining the conclusions I have drawn myself.
Waking up at five is not the same as only being able to sleep until five
This has become the biggest difference for me.
This can be true:
I often wake up at five.
But I had added a conclusion:
Therefore, I cannot sleep after five.
And that was the part I had never really examined.
Because what did I do when I woke up?
I got out of bed.
That meant I never gave my body a chance to show me whether I could fall asleep again.
It almost feels a little funny when I look at it now.
For many years, I had collected plenty of evidence that I woke up at five.
But hardly any evidence that I could not sleep after five.
The numbers are starting to change too
And I can already see it in my Garmin data.
During the week of September 20–26, I slept an average of:
6 hours and 12 minutes.
My average wake-up time was:
5:24 a.m.
During the week of September 27–October 3:
7 hours and 18 minutes of sleep.
Average wake-up time:
6:13 a.m.
That is more than an extra hour of sleep on average.
I am not saying that everything is solved.
My estimated sleep need is still considerably higher than that.
But my old statement:
I cannot sleep past five
is becoming very difficult to defend.
This also exists in sleep treatment
When I started reading about this, I discovered that CBT is in fact used for long-term sleep difficulties.
1177, Sweden’s national healthcare information service, states that CBT is recommended as a first-line treatment for persistent sleep problems. Treatment can include mapping sleep, understanding sleep difficulties and learning techniques that may help sleep become more continuous.
👉 Read about sleep difficulties and CBT at 1177
That does not mean that all sleep disorders can simply be thought away.
That is not what I have discovered either.
My sleep disturbance can still be real.
But I do not have to turn it into an absolute truth about everything my body can and cannot do.
That is an important difference.
I do not have to let the sleep disturbance take over my whole life
Perhaps this is the most important part for me.
I can know that I have problems with sleep.
I can accept that.
But acceptance does not have to mean:
This is how it is, and nothing can be changed.
I can still investigate.
Practise.
Try.
Get to know my body again.
That is really what I have been doing this week.
Not fighting my body.
More like stopping myself from deciding in advance what it is capable of.
Life slapped my old belief in the face
Because that is honestly what it feels like.
I walked around believing that I knew:
I wake up at five. I cannot sleep any longer. I have a sleep disturbance, after all.
And then my body suddenly seemed to answer:
Really? Are you completely sure about that?
First six.
Then seven.
And I still do not know where my real limit is.
Perhaps I should not even be looking for a specific time limit.
Perhaps the question should instead be:
Has my body finished sleeping?
Between the lines
This is probably about more than sleep.
How many things do we walk around telling ourselves?
This is just who I am.
I cannot do that.
My body works this way.
I have always been like this.
Sometimes, of course, those things are true.
But sometimes a real problem may, over the years, have grown into a much bigger story about who we are and what we are capable of.
My doctor told me that I had a sleep disturbance.
Over time, what I heard was:
You cannot sleep any longer.
That was not the same thing.
And after all these years, I have taken out an old CBT tool and asked one very simple question:
How do you know that is true?
Right now, my body seems to be answering:
You did not actually know.
Questions for you
Is there something you have regarded as an absolute truth about yourself for a long time?
Have you ever discovered that “this is just who I am” was actually an old pattern?
Do you wake up early and get out of bed immediately?
And what might happen if, one day, you asked your own belief:
How do you know?
Read more on Malix
👉 Sova längre – vad händer när jag flyttar morgonen?
Sources and further reading
👉 The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare – CBT, cognitive behavioural therapy
Live today, right now. Tomorrow is another day.
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