I Have More Hours in My Day Now, and I’m Not Sure How I Feel About It

What CBT-I is teaching me about sleep, routines, rest, and what I actually want to do with my time

I recently started Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia, or CBT-I.

I should probably begin by admitting that CBT has never been my favorite approach to therapy.

As a therapist, I tend to be drawn toward approaches that are more experiential, emotion-focused, relational, and interested in understanding what is happening underneath the surface. I certainly believe CBT has its place, particularly when we're learning concrete skills or looking at patterns between our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. But it isn't usually the kind of therapy that makes my therapist heart especially excited.

So when a sleep specialist suggested that CBT-I was the best-supported treatment for my insomnia, I noticed something immediately:

I was annoyed.

Not exactly the open-minded clinical response one might hope for.

I suspect therapists can develop a particular kind of arrogance about our preferred approaches. We spend years studying different theories and approaches, developing our own clinical identities, and deciding what resonates with us. Then someone recommends an approach that isn't ours, and apparently some small part of the brain would like to respond, Thank you, but I have attended graduate school.

Unfortunately for that part of my brain, I also believe in evidence-based practice.

And I know that preferring one therapeutic approach doesn't mean other approaches don't have value. Different problems call for different tools, and CBT can be particularly useful when the goal involves learning and practicing specific skills and changing patterns that may be keeping us stuck.

Also, perhaps most importantly:

I am desperate to sleep better.

I've finished graduate school. My schedule is beginning to normalize. I'm building my therapy practice. For the first time in a long time, my life is starting to feel a little less like one enormous endurance event.

I would really like to be awake enough to enjoy it.

So I decided I was going to be a model therapy patient. I would show up, follow the recommendations, and give the treatment a genuine chance rather than deciding ahead of time that I knew better.

This is how, in an effort to improve my sleep, I somehow agreed to temporarily spend less time in bed.

I recognize that this sounds like a questionable strategy.

After the first session with the psychologist, I tracked my sleep for a week so we could get a clearer picture of how much time I was actually sleeping versus how much time I was spending in bed trying to sleep. Based on that information, my sleep specialist gave me an initial sleep window of 11:45 PM to 6:15 AM. The idea isn't that six and a half hours is all the sleep I should ever get. This is the starting point, and the window can be adjusted as my sleep becomes more consistent and efficient.

I am not naturally a 6:15-in-the-morning kind of person. I would like that noted for the record.

Thankfully, the schedule may change as I move through the program, but for now, I suddenly have something I haven't had in a long time:

More waking hours.

And I've discovered that I don't entirely know what to do with them.

Apparently, I Have to Figure Out How I Want to Be Awake

One of the unexpected things about changing my sleep schedule has been realizing that I don't just need to figure out when I'm going to sleep.

I have to figure out how I want to be awake.

When you're tired a lot, it's easy for life to become organized around getting through things. Work. School. Appointments. Responsibilities. Whatever absolutely has to happen that day.

For the past several years, there was almost always another paper to write, internship hours to complete, work to get to, or something else waiting for me. Now graduate school is finished, my internship is over, and my life is slowly settling into whatever comes next.

At almost exactly the same time, CBT-I has handed me several additional conscious hours each week.

Naturally, my brain immediately wants to know what we're going to accomplish with them.

Perhaps I should exercise.

And meal prep.

And clean the house.

And work on my business.

And read all the books I keep buying despite already owning enough unread books to sustain me through several minor apocalypses.

I could garden. Do some diamond art. Learn to sew. Tackle a home project. Study. Write. Finally take that bag of donations to Goodwill that has apparently become a permanent member of the household. I could watch movies, cook when I actually have time for it, play a completely unnecessary game on my phone, walk my dog, sit outside, or read something just because it's fun.

There are plenty of things I could do with the extra time.

But I've started wondering whether that's actually the question I want to be asking.

More Time Doesn’t Have to Mean More Productivity

I am very good at turning available time into a list of things I should be doing.

Perhaps you know this particular form of nonsense.

Rest becomes something you're allowed to do after you've accomplished enough.

Hobbies become projects.

Reading becomes a goal.

Movement becomes exercise that should happen a certain number of times per week.

Cooking becomes meal prep.

Even mindfulness can somehow become another item on a checklist.

And suddenly you've taken all the things that are supposed to make life feel richer and assigned them performance metrics.

But I also seem to have two competing instincts when I have unscheduled time. One wants to accomplish seventeen things and become an entirely new person by dinner. The other would prefer that nobody, including me, make any demands whatsoever.

Neither is especially interested in moderation.

So part of this experiment is figuring out whether I can give my days some shape without making them feel rigid, and give myself freedom without letting every passing impulse determine what happens next.

I don't want to turn these extra hours into another opportunity to measure whether I'm doing life correctly.

Instead, I'm wondering:

What would it look like to build days that actually feel good to live in?

I’m Trying to Notice What I Actually Need

This is where mindfulness has been sneaking into the experiment.

Not necessarily formal meditation. I appreciate meditation, but mindfulness doesn't always need a cushion, a timer, and someone gently telling you to notice your breath.

Sometimes it can just be noticing.

What does my body need today?

Am I restless and wanting to move, or am I exhausted?

Would walking the dog feel good, or would sitting outside with a book feel better?

Do I actually want to work on that project, or am I trying to prove something to myself by being productive?

Am I hungry? What sounds tolerable to eat?

Would cooking feel comforting today, or would assembling a collection of snacks and declaring it dinner be perfectly adequate?

What would make my home feel a little nicer to be in?

What sounds fun?

What do I want?

That last question can be surprisingly difficult.

I'm also learning that rest doesn't always mean sleep or doing absolutely nothing. Sometimes reading feels restorative. Sometimes I want to make something with my hands, tend to my plants, watch television and contribute absolutely nothing to society for an hour, or spend time with someone I love. Sometimes I need movement. Sometimes I need solitude.

I'm trying to get better at noticing the difference between what I think I should need and what might actually restore me.

Learning to Make Peace With Structure

Structure and I have historically had a somewhat complicated relationship.

My natural inclination is not to create a routine and lovingly follow it. It's much closer to: I'll do whatever the hell I want whenever I want, thank you very much.

There is something about structure that can immediately make me feel controlled. Even when I am the person who created the structure. Apparently I am perfectly capable of rebelling against my own rules.

But lately I've been learning something I don't particularly enjoy admitting:

Some structure is actually good for me.

Doing whatever I feel like doing in the moment doesn't always result in doing what ultimately feels good.

Reading at 3 AM for three hours because I'm completely absorbed in a book feels excellent at 3 AM. It feels considerably less brilliant the next day.

Working straight through the day without taking a break can feel necessary when there's a seemingly endless amount of work to do. But by the end of the day, I'm exhausted, haven't eaten enough, and have somehow convinced myself that basic human maintenance was an unreasonable interruption.

There is a difference, I'm learning, between freedom and simply following every impulse I have in the moment.

That's part of what has been interesting about CBT-I. It is asking me to follow a structure around something I've historically approached much more casually. There is a bedtime. There is a wake time. There are rules about what I do when I can't sleep.

My first instinct is approximately, You are not the boss of me.

Unfortunately, sometimes the rules have a point.

I'm starting to think about structure less as something designed to control me and more as something that can help me take care of myself.

Following a routine doesn't mean every day for the rest of my life has to look exactly the same.

Scheduling a break doesn't mean I have to stop working the second a timer goes off.

Planning time to move my body, eat something, read, or go outside doesn't mean every minute of my life needs an appointment.

Maybe structure can be more like a container than a cage.

Enough structure to protect the things that matter to me, with enough flexibility that my life still feels like mine.

I'm still figuring out where that balance lives.

But I'm beginning to respect the possibility that the version of me who wants to do whatever she wants at any given moment and the version of me who would like to be healthy, rested, creative, and reasonably functional may occasionally need to negotiate.

And perhaps neither one should be allowed to run the entire operation.

I’m Still Figuring This Out

I don't have a beautiful conclusion about CBT-I yet.

I'm still doing it.

I'm still tired.

I still don't particularly appreciate 6:15 AM.

And I don't yet know what my sleep schedule will look like when I'm further along in the process.

But I do like one thing this experiment has made me think about.

Time isn't only something to manage. It's something I get to experience.

I don't want the goal of having more waking hours to be squeezing more productivity into my life. I want some of those hours to contain things that make me feel more like myself.

Books.

Food I enjoy.

My home.

My dog.

Things growing outside.

Creative projects I'm good at and creative projects I'm terrible at.

Learning.

People I love.

Quiet.

Laughter.

Rest.

Maybe that's part of what I'm trying to practice right now: paying attention to my life while I'm actually living it, rather than constantly evaluating whether I'm using it well enough. Giving my days enough structure to take care of myself, without becoming so focused on the structure that I forget to actually live them.

I don't know yet whether CBT-I will transform my relationship with sleep.

But apparently it's already making me think about my relationship with being awake.

And maybe that's worth paying attention to, too.