Leaving the Struggle is Not a Sprint: It’s a Journey 

I'm almost there thankfully after 4 months of watching this channel along with Alina's. I'm at the point where I can sleep the same duration that I used to before insomnia (7-9h), but there is still some hyperarousal there which is causing multiple wake ups per night, and the sleep quality is obviously not the greatest. It causes some physical anxiety symptoms too, even though I am not consciously anxious, like mild heart palpitations and an acute feeling of uneasiness in my chest. But I don't worry about or fixate on these feelings because I know exactly why they are happening; it's just my brain on autopilot mode trying to work things out. Also it makes me unsure of whether I am drowsy enough to fall asleep yet since the drowsiness is a little muted. Before insomnia I could know straight away whether I'd be able to fall asleep or not just based off of how I'm feeling, but now I kind of have to go against my intuition and just close my eyes regardless of whether I believe I'm tired enough to sleep. Just for anyone interested I've had insomnia since January this year. When it was at its worst, I went a few days straight where each time I tried to sleep, I'd sleep for around half an hour before waking up wide awake. But most of my worst nights were usually around 4 hours of sleep. It all started because I messed up my sleep pattern very badly (12pm-8pm sleep time) when I was between jobs, causing me to become very stressed about it and depressed because I struggled to fix it, as a result I started randomly waking up after 3/4/5 hours every night feeling wide awake but exhausted, which left me very confused and inevitably sent me on a long quest to try and figure out what the cause was. I tried literally everything (cutting out foods, supplements, intense exercise, more sunlight, blood tests, sleep apnoea tests, sleeping pills) before I finally found this channel through reddit and realised that I myself was the cause...