Chronic Insomniac And Obsessed With Sleep

Ok, I am first time poster, but I have been battling insomnia for over 12 years. It been under some control over the years, but each year it has gradually gotten worse.

Let's start with some background. Generally I am a very happy person w/o a lot of stress in my life (other than insomnia). I have always been a person who is overly concerned w/ sleep growing up. I never had any problems, but would always tend to think about sleep too much (like I had to get a perfect amount of sleep or had to control my sleep environment perfectly or I would get anxious).

By nature I am a pretty controlled and risk averse person. Growing up I had always tried to put my self in a position of not having to risk getting out of my sleep confort zone. That meant avoiding a lot of travel or sleeping in room w/ another person.

Well, 12 years ago, I was dating a girl I liked, and decided to make a bold move to take a trip to europe for 2 weeks with her. Well, this trip turned out to be a complete disaster and started my on a road of lasting obsession w/ sleep, and recurring insomnia.

During the trip I could not sleep at all. To make matters worse, my girlfriend at the time was not understanding. To make a long story short, I came back and could not get over my insomnia. I tried various medications but none would work. I took me over 6 months form me to gradually build back to getting a full nights sleep.

However, since this time I have become so fearful that I could relapse into another 6 month horrible stint of insomnia. I have avoided taking all risks (such as major travel, I don't sleep in the same room w/ my wife, I have developed more and more late night rituals, such as eating specific foods and exact orders or else I freak out that I did not so my sleep rituals perfectly.). I also have been taking 1 melatonin and 1 valerian each night for the last 12 years to further my ocd tendancies (note this tablets do nothing for me, but if I don't do my nighttime rituals perfectly, I will almost sure stress out and not sleep.)

and when I have a bad nights sleep, I tend to really freek out leading to more and more bad nights sleeps. So I have been doing this controlled environment just to avoid having another huge 6 month relapse of near complete insomnia.

Overtime, however, no matter how many rituals and controls, I do, I tend to have more and more bouts of serious insomnia. Lately for the last 2 months, I have been averaging only 3-5 hours a sleep a night, and sometimes none at all.

I am soooo frustrated. I have always known that my obsession about sleep and having such a controlled sleep environment w/ all my rituals would be a problem that would continue to get worse and it has.

I have read the stories by tomoftexas and I am so scared to remove all my rituals and just go cold turkey for fear of not even getting a barely manageble 3 hours of sleep a night.

But by not beating this thing, it is only getting worse and worse and at some point, I am going to have to face my fears and try getting out of my confort zone.

All I want to do is to be able to sleep fairly normally and when I have a bad night's relapse, not to freak out where a new major bout of insomnia will last weeks, if not months.

This fear of an ever spiriling insomnia bout after just one bad nights sleep is all consuming. It seems to happen every time I don't sleep well for whatever reason. I have a conditioned response after one night of poor sleep. It's like "here we go again" is always playing in my head.

Help!