Sounds like my last work schedule. Seriously, once you hit a certain age, your body just can’t adapt like that anymore.
A dear friend considers herself lucky if she can get 2-3 hours of uninterrupted sleep each night.
She has petit mal epilepsy as well as a mild case of ADD. She’s on medication for both.
Even with medication she cannot sustain relaxing her mind enough to physically rest. Her wiring misfires.
When she was in her 20s she went the alcohol/drug route and stopped when it was becoming clear she was heading down a particular path.
She has three kids. Her oldest – I think she’s now 12 or 13 – inherited her “wiring” and bops between sleeping and keeping her company in the middle of the night.
I also have a couple of friends who developed insomnia after treatment for their breast cancer. Apparently one of the drugs in the chemo cocktail is to blame. I can’t remember its name at the moment.
I had some fairly serious insomnia for about a year-and-a-half, about 10 years ago, when I quit taking benzos. I was getting about 2 hours a night, maybe, and having near non-stop major anxiety attacks.
One detail about severe insomnia that’s been hinted at in a lot of the above posts, but not emphasized enough, is how gruesomely torturous it is. Some posts above mention things like psychosis, getting disconnected from reality, and effects like that – but that doesn’t really convey how awfully horribly unpleasant it is, even at the relatively mild stages.
It’s seriously a bad trip.
Weirdly, working crazy swing shift hours for about 6 months actually appeared to help me sleep better. I had mild insomnia before, but though the shift pattern utterly messed me up at the time, since I quit that job, I’ve been sleeping far better than I had for years.
It was like making sleep more difficult trained my body to be better at grabbing it while I could.
Your body will force you to sleep.
I’ve had insomnia my entire adult life. My body clock functions much better late at night. Ideally I rest during the day.
My job forces me to be up during the day. I often doze off in my chair at work. I always wake within 30 mins because my head has fallen forward and my neck is uncomfortable.
It’s gotten worse since my forties. Perhaps even mild narcolepsy. I used to fight it off by taking a brisk walk. Now, I get sleepy again after sitting down.
My best solution is not to fight it. A 30 min nap refreshes me for several hours. My body knows when it needs rest.
I’ve had severe insomnia, but only when I try to force myself onto a standard early-morning ‘business hours’ schedule. The way I survive it is that I don’t.
I was chronically sleep deprived in high school, which started at half-past seven in the morning. I slept through alarm clocks, and was eventually so bad that my parents couldn’t rouse me by physically coming into my bedroom and shaking me awake. I missed an average of a day a week, because I just could not function well enough to go.
I assumed I could fix this in college, where I actually liked the classes and therefore wanted to go. No. I eventually learned to just not schedule anything before about 11 am, because I would either disintegrate into a dysfunctional wreck or sleep through it.
The last time I tried it, I was trying to keep a job that I desperately needed. I broke down so hard from sheer lack of sleep that I ended up in the ER. They gave me a 90-ct bottle of Xanax tablets(!) and send me home with instructions to take them nightly. I still got 2-3 hours of sleep at best, unless I reverted back to my natural sleep cycle, which is about 3-4 in the morning to 11-noonish.
I have tried everything under the sun to reset my schedule and nothing has worked. My solution is just to not get up early in the morning anymore. I tell roommates that if they wake me before I get up on my own, and I find out it’s not because the house is on fire, I will fix that.
I’ve had on-and-off insomnia since I was a little kid. On average, I’ll have two-three nights of four hours, two-three of six or so, then a few nights of eight+. I take Ambien once in a while, but it tends to give me a rather poor quality of sleep and headaches. At this point in my life my attitude is that it won’t kill me (though I try not to drive if I’ve had several nights of scant sleep – I read driving under-slept is the equivalent of or worse to drunk driving).
There’s an incredibly interesting book title The Family that Couldn’t Sleep; it’s about an Italian family that has a genetic “stop sleeping and die” gene.
Based on personal experience, I think family, relationships etc. are very important in controlling insomnia and mental health conditions like depression and anxiety. They may not cure them but will keep them under control in most cases. Maybe it is because they provided a sense of security, someone to talk to, and because there are plenty of things going on in a family, it diverts our mind for the better. Also, internet, work etc. are not a substitute for this.
I often get only 5-6 hours a night. Last night I turned the light out at 11 and went to sleep fairly quickly. At 4:30 I woke up to go pee and just didn’t get back to sleep. After a couple hours, I got up.
Incidentally, using alcohol or pot to go to sleep interferes with REM sleep which is what you really need. Listen to the second episode from last week’s Quirks and Quarks: Home | Quirks & Quarks with Bob McDonald | CBC Radio exactly on that subject. I wonder what other sleeping pills do.
And in the non-drug category, Kindles and other light-emitting electronics are also very bad to use in bed. Unfortunately, I read a few hours every night and have become so blind I use the uber-size font on Kindle* (the joke in my house is that the day is coming where I’ll need to make the font so large there will be one word per page :D)
*I can’t stand to wear glasses in bed. I’m only comfy lying on my side, I have weird ears, and glasses are uncomfortable to wear. Lying on my frames also causes big zits behind my earflaps (I’m Bringin’ Sexy Baaack!)