Fear of waking

I've always been a light sleeper but used to sleep through the night with no issues nearly all the time. It appears that a traumatic breakup with my ex triggered sleep problems. Initially this was trouble getting to sleep but nowadays the problem is waking too early in the morning.

My sleep pattern is something along the lines of - fall asleep between 30 and 60 minutes after going to bed, wake once in the night, then wake up way before my alarm goes off. Sometimes I can go back to sleep and make it through to my alarm, sometimes I can't.

I've put this down to a "fear of waking" - I can't bring a specific thought process to mind regarding this, but I feel a certain dread about waking up. This is either a fear of my alarm clock not going off, or fear of being startled by the alarm clock. I've previously had CBT regarding this but it hasn't helped as the thought is so deep within that I can't rationalise with it, it's just a feeling of fear/dread in my chest.

I also read that depression causes early waking and I wondered if this was the actual issue and I have just created this "fear" to supply myself with a narrative as to why I'm waking up early. I don't feel depressed/hopeless but I can suffer with low mood especially if I've slept particularly badly the previous night.

My doctor was pretty useless about this, they said that because I average over 6 hours sleep a night everything is basically fine - they didn't seem to understand that repeatedly getting less sleep than I naturally would can cause a significant impact on quality of life.

Things I've considered:

 - Hypnosis

 - Sleep restriction, by making myself so tired or shortening the period in bed so much that I do sleep through to my alarm and gradually learn that waking is nothing to worry about.

Any thoughts would be gratefully received!

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