I Have a New Respect for Insomniacs

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So I’ve always seen the commercials for sleep-aids, OTC and prescription, and I’ve thought in a vague way, “Oh, that would kinda suck,” but in my mind, I’d never considered it a serious problem…you know, compared to “real” problems like the flu or disease or obesity, etc. I’d thought to myself, “I’ve gone to work on three hours of sleep with a hangover! Yeah it sucks, so what?” I’ve been a bartender for years; I go to bed when the sun rises and sleep peacefully til two in the afternoon, sunlight and “internal clocks” be damned.

Until the last three weeks or so, when for some unknown reason, I couldn’t get more than 3/4 hours of sleep. Period. Ever. Even if I laid in bed for hours, I would remain awake.

It’s a kind of hell. I had no idea. After a few days I felt like I was living underwater. My eyes burned. My head ached. I couldn’t concentrate. I was forgetting things. I was dizzy with fatigue at work. Normal things would make me want to cry. I’d walk around a store and feel light-headed, almost trance-like. I experienced a kind of paranoia. I’d try to nap and my mind would go overtime to prevent it. Normally I take a few shots with customers while I’m working, but I couldn’t manage more than two; they made me feel sick and dizzy and even more vulnerable to everything. And if any of the customers said anything to me like, “You should smile!” I snapped their heads off. I had absolutely no patience and no empathy for anyone else. In many ways I didn’t even recognize myself.

And I’d go to bed, so exhausted that my limbs felt weighted down–a weird sensation like gravity was heavier than usual–and then wake up, again, two or three hours later. Wanting to cry.

I read various SDMB threads and Googled it also last night, and someone said that after awhile you become your own worst enemy, because you go to bed knowing you won’t sleep so you don’t. So you have to “break the cycle.”

The bedroom I share with my SO doesn’t have curtains; it also has two huge picture-windows with just mini-blinds. Even when they’re closed, the room is a light-box. And even though my SO doesn’t snore, it got to the point that if I could hear him breathing I couldn’t ignore it.

Our guest bedroom only has one, much smaller window. I decided to sleep in there last night. New bed, no partner, hardly any light…hoping that I could “stop the tape” in my head that said I couldn’t go back to sleep by disrupting my usual recent pattern.

IT WORKED!

I slept for over eight hours! I woke up about five times but I went back to sleep within minutes!

It’s pathetic how happy I am. How grateful and almost skippy with glee. I feel like a human being. I had no idea how grateful one could be just to feel normal.

So to all those who suffer from insomnia, you have my profound respect. I am humbled by what it did to me. I am going to buy huge black-out curtains for my bedroom, and a “white-noise” filter, and see if I can break the cycle permanently…because I don’t want to sleep in the guest bedroom permanently of course…but even if I had to, that would be better than the hell of the last three weeks.

I don’t know how people with chronic insomnia manage it. I had no idea how crippling it could be.

Ignorance fought, my friends!

2

Welcome to my life for the past… 15? years? Maybe more. I know I had trouble sleeping as early as high school (grade 7 for me), and I don’t really remember if I had issues before then. On a good night, I only wake up once or twice, and only for a few minutes. I cannot, and as far as I can tell have never, been able to sleep for more than about 3-4 hours without waking up. On an average night, I wake up for longer periods of time - 15, 20 minutes, maybe an hour or more. On a bad night… well, there are nights when I simply don’t sleep, or I toss and turn in half-sleep-half-awake daze, feeling like crap and just wanting to die. I’ve had episodes where I’ve averaged about 3 hours of constantly interrupted sleep a night for weeks on end, and there was even one time where I went nearly 4 days without being able to sleep at all - not even 15 minutes cat naps!

I have never tried prescription meds, but OTCs don’t really do much for me. They make my body more tired (as if it wasn’t already, with my muscles feeling like spaghetti!) but they do absolutely nothing to shut my damn brain up. I’m a victim of the broken-record mental radio, where a sound, a word, a line from a song will just repeat itself in my head over and over and over and over and over and over and over… again. The earworm from HELL.

I once spent a whole night listening to my brain deconstruct the word “Mövenpik” into “move and pick” (Mövenpik is a buffet-style restaurant where you walk around a “marketplace” and choose your food items and they are cooked in front of you). It was terrible.

I also once had the McDonald’s version of “Do you believe in magic?” stuck in my head, including mental images of the Ronald McDonald commercials. To try and get rid of it, I tried to sing another song… and came up with Nine Inch Nails’ “Eraser”. I can’t begin to express how freaked out my brain then got, as it imagined Ronald McDonald chanting “Kill me kill me kill me kill me!” over and over and over and over and over… you get the point.

I hate going to bed, and put it off as much as possible most nights (a bad habit, as it’s recommended to try and maintain a regular sleep/wake schedule), but the fact is, the moment my head hits the pillow it’s like some rowdy college kids start cranking up the mental radio, or I start freaking out about nothing in particular (I once was panicking because I couldn’t remember where my car was… when we had a reserved parking spot, and it was always in the same damn place!)

sigh For those of you lucky enough to never suffer from insomnia, or to just have a few passing phases of it in your lives - be grateful for it. I don’t really know what a good nights sleep feels like, and my body hates me for it. It’s terrible to have a brain and body that don’t like each other!

3

Insomniac checking in here. Even as I type this, my eyes are watering and I’m yawning. I couldn’t get to sleep until around 6 this morning, and I finally had to get up at around 1 today because we’re going over to a friends house this evening.
All of the symptoms you describe are pretty much spot on. I’m rarely fully awake, but cannot stay fully asleep, either. The best nights of sleep I get are punctuated by waking up every few hours when the mental tape starts rolling and I start the process of trying to get back to it. Sometimes I’m only awake for a few minutes during that time, but it’s enough to bitch things up completely.
A few years ago, I started telling my doc about it and he prescribed ambien. Didn’t do jack shit, and I have to tell you that I’m jealous as all get out over the stories I’ve heard here about how profoundly it works for some people.
It started getting worse, and I ignored it until recently when I developed a really severe eye twitch that will. not. stop. So the doctor, with some alarm, said, “Uh, you need to SLEEP.” and gave me a prescription for 30 mg temazepam. Apparently, this should have put me down like and elephant gun, but nothing. I got my proof of how seriious this drug is when my husband decided to take one when he was having trouble one night and it made him…well, a bona fide nutjob. Knocked him stupid!
I’ve had the sleep study done that checks for apnea, and I don’t have that, so nobody really knows what my problem is. Besides stress, but that’s a whole 'nother subject. Why does my body have to be resistant to the good stuff?!
I’m sorry you had to have any of that, Audrey. It’s a crazy feeling, innit? Glad you found a way to nip it in the bud!

4

Same with me. I never thought of insomnia as a really serious issue until I experienced the same thing you just did, a couple years ago.

5

Welcome. I hope you won’t be offended if I say that I hope you won’t stay long…

Sleeping more than 2 hours straight is a gift from God himself.

6

I’ve occasionally had insomnia - generally just one night’s worth - and you have my sympathy. I’m told that sex is a good cure.

7

Actually sex is NOT a good cure because that just gets the heart going and all kinds of stuff. Maybe it’s better for men, but I’m a girl, so can’t speak to that. And actually, since the divorce, the insomnia has actually improved, for the most part, since I don’t have to deal with his twitchy feet, snoring, and tossing around.

But, yeah. It sucks. Last week was one of the worst I have had in years. Alternating nights I would be awake from 2 a.m. on (which means three hours of sleep), with opposing nights being so zoned out on Ambien that I can’t really function until noon the next day, at the earliest. And I am new at my job - three and a half weeks, and training. Not good. It. Is. Hell.

Is anyone aware of a genetic component? Every single one of my female relatives on the maternal side suffer from insomnia. Or maybe it’s a personality component? I can remember having it as a kid. I would wake up in the middle of the night and have to read my Charlie Brown books to fall back asleep. That might sound funny, but trust me, it was not!

8

Another lifelong insomniac checking in. Since about the fifth grade, I’ve had long periods of insomnia followed by short periods of fairly normal sleep. Usually about a 5 week to 1 week ratio. The only time I did not was years ago when I worked a close shift at a restaurant and my normal sleep pattern was dawn until around noon. Five or six hours of deep, restful sleep. The job sucked, but it did let me know that the real problem seems to be that my body simply seems to be on a different natural sleep pattern.

Last couple years the insomnia frequency seems to be tapering off, but I spend a lot more time lucid dreaming. I don’t use any sleep aids and never have since my body plays catch-up from time to time. Still I wonder what it’s like to not be tired a significant amount of my waking time. At least I have a job now that is fairly flexible about the time I come in, so that is helping.

9

Insomnia, my personal hell. If I get 4 hours of sleep without interruption I am grateful. My master bedroom faces east. I wear an eye cover but I can still see the light. I guess I have thin eyelids or something.
Even though my fish tank water filter is really quiet it still makes too much noise for me so I have to turn it off at night, sorry fish.
I usually have 2-3 beers in the evening so sleeping pills are out. I know that drinking alcohol can affect the sleep cycle but I like my beer.

I know for me that getting laid helps knock me out, any willing female dopers out there? :wink:

10

Almost 15 years worth here too and all I wanted to add is that when you do find it permanently again, guard it like your life. Otherwise, dealing with lack of sleep long term makes the baby Jesus cry. Hang in there.

11

I have dealt with insomnia since I was four years old. My usual problem is difficulty falling asleep, but I’ve also gone through periods of middle of the night waking, early morning waking, etc…
I fought and struggled for 25 years, making myself incredibly miserable. I finally gave up and accepted that there will just be times I am going to be awake, and days I just can’t perform as well as I would like. C’est la vie.

12

Heh… my brain spent a couple hours this morning redesigning the fucked up bathroom and living room it encountered in a dream last night. No fun waking up at 5 am thinking “that was a weird house!” and then obsessively trying to mentally fix it before going back to sleep!

13

My problem is usually getting back to sleep once I wake up in the middle of the night. I yearn for the days when I could sleep a full night without having to get up once to urinate.

My newest trick is to stay out from under the covers until I am very very chilly. Getting back under the covers then seems to put me to sleep.

14

Oh man. My first bout with insomnia, I didn’t know there *was *anything that could be done about it. I went about six months on about 4 hours per night - and I truly need 9. My body was falling apart in all kinds of ways by the time I told my doctor, including getting into a borderline hallucinogenic state at random times.

She settled my hash very well, and now I have only periodic nights of no sleep. Like last night. Torment.

15

Hereditary insomniac here. I have a throwaway days a week that I cannot fully function due to cumulative sleep loss. i do, however, live a secret life in which I read mass amounts of books, frequently several times, that I would not trade for the habits of the normal people.

while yer snoozin, I’m reading 1984 for the fifteenth time.

16

Since this is something that’s just recently come on, I’d recommend getting a physical and asking to have your thyroid checked. Hyperthyroidism can lead to insomnia, and you don’t even have to be that low on the scale for it to affect you. I know – I’ve been unable to sleep for months and tried almost every kind of prescription sleep aid, only to find out that my thyroid had gone into overdrive. In my case it was due to the level of thyroid hormones I take to counter my Hashimoto’s disease, so I just needed to adjust my meds, but hyperthyroidism can have several causes, so it might be worth getting it checked.

Good luck!

17

I’m only rarely afflicted by the “brain won’t shut up” syndrome, maybe on night a week or so, so I count myself among the lucky ones.

My boyfriend, on the other hand, often finds himself unable to sleep till 3 or 4 in the morning, and then he can’t get up till past noon, and then it starts a cycle of sleeping at the wrong times. I’m not sure it counts as pure insomnia, since he does sleep, but it’s a very screwy sleep cycle and it’s hard to get adjusted to (I just moved in and I’m learning to adapt). Luckily he has the sort of job where he can set his own hours, because I don’t know what he’d do otherwise.

So I feel for all of you who can’t get enough sleep, and also all of you who are living with the consequences of a family member who can’t sleep.

18

So far so good; I slept like a baby last night. (Although I’d had some drinks so that always makes falling asleep kinda effortless. I didn’t wake up once, though.)

I don’t dread going to bed though, like I did. I’m actually quite sleepy right now and looking forward to it. That was perhaps the worst thing of all…thinking of my bed as the enemy.

Thanks for all the replies. My sympathies to those of you for whom this is not temporary.

19

It’s 5:30am here and I’m wide awake. Haven’t slept. This happens frequently. Too frequently. I hate it. My problem is the “brain won’t shut up” kind, toss and turn for hours, finally get up, resigned to not sleeping. Sometimes I get a couple of hours before it’s time to go to work. If I’m lucky it’s my day off and I can get five or six.

I’m starting to get sleepy now actually. But I have to be up in an hour anyway, so going to sleep now would be pointless. I’m very stressed, depressed and I have massive anxiety these days. Those things and the insomnia seem to be feeding off each other. The lack of sleep makes the stress and anxiety worse and the stress and anxiety interfere with sleep. It’s a vicious cycle.

With any luck, I get some needed respite when my body finally succumbs…sometime, soon…I hope. :frowning:

20

I’ve been one since early childhood. I have “brain working overtime” syndrome when I’m dropping off, then I usually wake up about 3 hours after I’ve finally fallen asleep.

I have to have a method to get me through the night, involving radios, bottles of water and this awesome eyepatch I got in NYC, which has a velvet ‘bar’ that protrudes gently into the eye sockets and creates a total light seal. Doing this, about once every two weeks, I manage between 7 and 9 hours with only one or two periods of wakefulness, and it feels like a significant achievement.

There was a BBC radio documentary on insomnia from this week. Some helpful stuff in there from a professor of sleep (or something like that).

In particular, if you start having problems, then you need to control your sleeping environment, and never do anything in your bed that isn’t to do with sleep (apart from sex, but only if it’s followed by immediate somnolence). No reading, no watching TV, no eating. Bed = sleep and nothing else.