Sleep Anxiety help

Three months ago, I developed an anxiety about sleep that made me constantly wonder, before even getting into bed, whether I was actually going to sleep or not. It all started during exams that were really important — for me, it felt like if I didn't sleep, I had both wasted time I could've spent studying and wasted time I could've spent sleeping. It was horrible, and I already posted about it once.

Moving forward, I heard about Daniel Erichson and his approach, and I came to understand that my insomnia was a result of my anxiety. Whenever I needed to wake up early or had something important to do — especially studying — I would struggle with sleep. It was easy to connect the dots, especially since during holidays I slept completely fine. Daniel Erichson's approach of removing the stress around sleep, making it more about feeling comfortable in bed and accepting that you might not fall asleep, helped me a lot. I also liked the fact that he denounced sleep hygiene, because I personally don't believe in it when you're an insomniac. Like, you're telling me that someone who hasn't slept in a day won't sleep because they were doom-scrolling before bed, while my friend has an intense gaming session and falls asleep just fine after? Yeah, that's not it.

I also developed this mindset of talking to myself — like a person calmly analyzing a situation. I'm a very introspective guy who thinks a lot, so this helped me cope with wakefulness and accept it. All of these things really helped me sleep normally again. I could even nap finally, despite not having been able to for months.

That was all going well, until problems started creeping in. My methods weren't perfect. For example, I never went to college having had more than 2–4 hours of sleep. I sleep late because I'm a night owl, and even when I try to shift my sleep earlier, I start having difficulties falling asleep. I tried to work around this by not attending every day, so I could sleep in on days I skipped, and I did manage to get generous naps here and there. It was starting to feel acceptable, honestly — other than studying and driving, most activities can be done just fine on little to no sleep. But studying is pretty much the main activity for a college student, so it was still a big source of anxiety.

Another big problem was that my biological clock got completely wrecked. Because of how irregular my sleep had become, I started feeling sleepy very early, and I swear there were periods where I'd go two days without sleep before feeling truly tired. This led to this weird feeling where I literally had to force myself to lie in bed for an hour or more before starting to feel sleepy.

Fast forward to now — these are my finals, and my methods are either stopping working or I no longer understand them the way I used to. The last five days have been rough. Not the worst anyone's ever been through, I'm sure, but rough for me. It started when I couldn't sleep one night, so I decided to take a long nap instead — wrong move, I know, but my reasoning was that I needed sleep to focus, and studying on zero sleep isn't ideal. I managed. The next day I struggled with sleep again, it drove me insane, but I eventually got about four hours. I still tried to study and push through my day, but when night came I was completely confused. I got anxious after not being able to fall asleep after an hour and a half, and started spiraling and cursing myself and everything around me. After another hour, I took Diphenhydramine. It helped me sleep for about 9 hours, finally.

But then today I took it again, and honestly I felt relatively relaxed going in. Sure, studying a lot is stressful — I'm actually a med student — and my lifestyle isn't healthy, but it's really hard to maintain a healthy lifestyle in my college. The Diphenhydramine did the opposite of what I needed. Instead of putting me to sleep, it made me suffer. I couldn't sleep, but I was too drowsy to get up and do anything else. So I was just lying in bed — awake but exhausted — for five and a half hours, and got zero sleep.

Honestly, I'm confused. This is absurd timing for my insomnia to come back. I'm not complaining — I'll do my best — but it's getting exhausting, and I'm starting to fear that I no longer understand what was even working in the first place.