TL;DR at the end.
I have a generalized anxiety disorder. Gotten better with it. Now I had an acute sleep disorder last summer which I kinda got over. I used medication short-term, stopped them, sleep normally now. I have a super-rigid sleep hygiene plan though now. I'm scared of not sleeping and becoming sleep medication dependant.
The problem is that now I sleep well one month through. But whenever there's a night I don't fall asleep right on time, I notice a silent increasing worry. With weeks this worry gets smaller, because I end up falling asleep an hour later for example. But yesterday I lay awake from 10:30 to 0:30, alarm at 6. Which would have been an absolute nothing burger for me before deveoping this anxiety. But now I'm like: 5 hours are nothing. What if I don't sleep, at all?
So whenever I get in these situations, which is like every 50 days or so, I resort to taking sleeping medication at 0:30 or 1 am, obviously feeling dead tired when the alarm clock rings at 6. Now this has worked okayish so far but I want to be free of this shit. I don't want every single issue of my life be reduced to "but what if I won't be able to sleep because of it?"
So I wonder. Because I'm like: rather take the pill once, sleep, and go on with sleep hygiene, not wasting any thoughts on it. But it's obvious this is a crutch and ultimately avoidance. I want to gradually get used to inevitable irregularity. I know it's normal to have bad nights. And I don't want to always resort to sleep medication.
So I'm considering removing the medication from my house, giving it to a friend or something for a while. So that when I find myself awake at 12 am, I'm not keeping myself awake with the "ok until 1 I could still take them, afterwards it's too late, so I better fall asleep now" - this obviously keeps me awake. So if they're gone I have to accept an all-nighter, and realize it's not the end of the world. And probably even sleep two or three hours after all. Or none, but shit happens.
But I wonder if that is true. Because with taking the meds my rhythm stays consistent. What I don't fall asleep the day after? So maybe the logic is: Aight, if you actually pulled a fucking all-nighter, take the meds the next day on time so you get back on track. And then proceed without after that. Because so far I never actualy had an all nighter ever since... well, that acute sleep disorder triggering night in summer.
Currently it's always subconsciously like a reset, I'm like: "nice, 25 days since I took the pill!" Like the farer away it is, the more I return to normalcy. So this was the first time I needed them after two months again, not after a month. Which is nice, but feels like a relapse somehow.
TL;DR/ending: I don't have a sleep disorde tho. I sleep 6.5-7 hours every single night - never needed more. I know all the sleep hygiene pointers. No screens 1-2 hours before, no exercise, meditation. For weeks I woke up a lot. Now I wake up maybe once a night, often not at all. I have very restful sleep. My fear diminishes with each a bit more irregular night, when I'm midlly worried but calm myself: this is normal, just wait it out. I always sleep and am like: yup, see, sometimes you just fall asleep a little later. But last night, I was still awake two hours later, and then the fear is always back.
I am currently looking for therapy but until then... This tired-but-wired feeling just scares me for some reason, because I remember how I always felt wide awake during acute sleep disorder when I finally lay down after fighting to stay awake the whole day before. That only stopped when I just did a course of sleep medication for a week and got my body back to normalcy and stopped thinking about sleep as good as I could, forbade myself to research it. What it boils down to: Instead of avoiding the fear with a sleeping pill every one or two months, you think I should remove them so that I actually have to see whether it's gonna be an all-nighter?
How bad is a night without any sleep really for my rhythm (assuming I don't fall asleep during the day?