The other interesting thing is 2 years ago it happened at the exact same time of year as well. Part of me feels like it's a combination of a lot of different things going on. The 'triggered event' was the icing on the cake, but a lot of stress at work, the long, cold winter blues, COVID this year living in a high risk household isolated from a lot of friends and family and not able to get out and do things. But I think you're spot on, some sort of 'trigger' seems to be the onset reason. If I've learned nothing else over the last couple of years now dealing with this a second time is that the mind is a very, very fragile thing and the sub conscious can be very scary when something goes slightly off track. A couple weeks of garbage sleep and your mind tends to wander to the worst and it's a really unfortunate downward spiral that can impact all aspects of your life and eventually actually make your health worse from ineffective/not enough sleep. My newest strategy is going to try and 'embrace' it and pump myself up to go to bed and tell myself I'm ready for it to come and beat it. If I wake up and it happens when I try to go back to sleep, rather than toss and turn and worry and end up away for an hour or two, I'm going to immediately sit up and read or do some sudoku's until I'm tired again and hopefully naturally fall back asleep. I've also found it fascinating reading a lot about sleep paralysis and how many believe these can be caused by your brain being 'tricked' thinking you're still asleep when you're actually awake and those internal tremors are normal during sleep. They also use that as an explanation as to why it goes away in the snap of a finger when you open your eyes and wake up more. My hope is to alert my brain I'm awake, reset it, get tired by reading, then go back to sleep naturally. I hope your continue to find some relief and things that help alleviate your symptoms.