I Have a New Respect for Insomniacs

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

[QUOTE=jjimm]
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.
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I’ve heard this suggestion before, and for a lot of people with transient insomnia, it really works. But me? No.

I’ve done that - did it for years, and it didn’t change a thing. Now I’ll occasionally read for 20 minutes or so in bed, and it has no impact either way. Other than that, though, the bedroom is sleep/sex/clothing only.

I’ve also cut back on sugar and caffeine (two definite triggers for me). A serving of coke at supper time will have me up all night, and a sugared dessert is worse! So sweets and caffeine (coke zero only) at noon or earlier, and nothing else. I don’t drink coffee or tea or use painkillers with caffeine either.

I have taken a course on relaxation techniques and sometimes they work, but often they don’t. For the past year, when I’m in a situation where I’m supposed to “concentrate on your breathing” I end up concentrating way too hard, and having trouble with it! It’s one of those things that your conscious brain just isn’t supposed to be thinking about!

Exercise has no appreciable effect on my sleeping pattern, and neither does giving myself “down time” before bed. Last night it was about 3-4 hours between my last effort at homework and bedtime, and I still spent the whole night thinking about C programming (the horror! Transcript: “malloc, malloc, malloc, curly-bracket, semi-colon, malloc malloc malloc…”)

There just isn’t any off switch.

22

Sugar! I didn’t think of that! I eat no sugar to speak of, and NEVER drink sugared soda, much less at night, but I bought some regular 7-Up when the store didn’t have diet the last time I bought. I wonder if that is it. Worth a try.

Mnemosyne, same with me. If I ain’t going to sleep, I ain’t going to sleep.

23

Last night I had trouble falling asleep and then woke up just about every hour, taking several minutes to fall back to sleep each time. I was going to take a nap today but I have to be up early in the morning so I think I will just go try to go to bed early tonight and hope I can sleep.

24

I have the occasional run with insomnia and I also have a firmly out of whack sleep cycle like an above posters boyfriend, for me I force my self to be at 2:00 am and try to force myself out at 10:00am but often dont make it til 11:00 (I really do need more than 8 hours most nights)

to help with the insomnia, my room is totally dark except for my clock that displays the time on the ceiling ( I am blind as a bat the only way I can read the clock is to put on glasses or have it in 1.5 foot tall numbers on the ceiling) instead of a curtain I have a comforter over the window, tacked down to keep stray sunlight from wandering in to early. my room will light up with daylight but its pretty dark even in full sunshine. that helps a ton. just having the total darkness really works wonders for me.

25

I also have a sort of random insommnia. I dont think I have it as bad as I have heard others describe their sleep, I just think my day/night cycle is screwed up. I absolutely cannot fall asleep between 9pm and 3am. No matter what I have done that day, I always seem to perk up a bit as the clock ticks on towards midnight.

Anyway, just to add my bit of advice, a massive factor on my sleeping ability is one that I dont hear mention all that often, the ventilation. I cannot emphasise enough to have a breeze flowing through the room you sleep in. If I am a closed room, my body seems to sense it in some way, and I will be tossing and turning for hours. Open the windows, and let the temperature drop enough that it isnt particularly warm in the room. You can still be snug and warm under the covers, and this always works a treat for me.

In fact, I wonder if anybody has ever come across any info on the levels of insommnia in cold countries against warmer countries??

26

bucketybuck, that would be interesting. I also have a fan on at night, and in the winter - now - I drop my thermostat down to 56 at night. I can’t stand it any warmer, and my kids don’t complain.

I cut out the massive four ounces of sugared soda last night and hopefully not coincidentally, slept like a baby. Haven’t slept what well in weeks! I hope that’s the key!!!

27

I’m a lifetime chronic insomniac. I just had a bout of four nights with about four hours of sleep each, and I did not want to open this thread. Yesterday, I had four cups of coffee just to work, and then around 4:00 I got sleepy. I lasted the day, went to bed at 8:30 and slept to 6:30!

I’ve just learned to function when I am unbelievably tired. I don’t eat at work, because eating sometimes makes me sleepy. Then I eat at night and it doesn’t work.

As Stephen King wrote in Insomnia: There is a big difference between being tired and being sleepy.

28

[QUOTE=Annie-Xmas]
I’m a lifetime chronic insomniac. I just had a bout of four nights with about four hours of sleep each, and I did not want to open this thread. Yesterday, I had four cups of coffee just to work, and then around 4:00 I got sleepy. I lasted the day, went to bed at 8:30 and slept to 6:30!

I’ve just learned to function when I am unbelievably tired. I don’t eat at work, because eating sometimes makes me sleepy. Then I eat at night and it doesn’t work.

As Stephen King wrote in Insomnia: There is a big difference between being tired and being sleepy.
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I can seriously agree with King - I read Insomnia.

I had hypercalcemia and some other odds and ends last summer - on top of my insomnia. People were amazed, I would do a 4 pack of red bull, and be pretty much asleep at my desk by 3 in the afternoon. Between getting 2-4 hours of sleep a night in 15 minute snatches [doze about 15 minutes, wake up about 30 or so] and the fatigue from the hypercalcemia and hyperparathyroidism I was about to go insane [and on top of very hostile human resource and bosses - they really did not understand how seriously bad off I was in July, August and September]

Nothing like walking laps around an office trying to stay awake after 3-4 days of almost no sleep. Sucks being able to get 4-5 hours sleep only in the mid afternoon and not being able to ‘reset’ your internal clock :frowning:

29

I actually had to organize my life around my insomnia. When I was younger, I couldn’t work 9-5, so I was always self-employed. People joked about how I was the mystery student in college, because I rarely attended classes. I just had to learn to do everything on my own, on my own time. Sleep came whenever I managed to find it - sometimes going 30 hours without sleep, sometimes only sleeping a couple of hours at a time, and sometimes I’d crash for 16 hours. If I tried to sleep when I wasn’t sleepy, I’d just stare at the ceiling. Reading in bed didn’t help, because reading activates my brain and gets me thinking, and that actually wakes me up.

I’ve found that after I turned 40, my system seems to have calmed down a bit. I don’t go into periods of insane activity and hyper-focus as much, and I can actually fall asleep if I just go to bed and force myself to try to sleep. So things are better, but I still only get at most 5-6 hours of sleep a night.

One thing I’ve found helps - video games. They’re kind of hypnotic. If I go to bed and read, hours can fly by without my getting sleepy. But if I take the DS to bed and play something like Picross or solitaire or some other puzzle game, it knocks me out in about 20 minutes.

30

[QUOTE=Critical1]
… the only way I can read the clock is to put on glasses or have it in 1.5 foot tall numbers on the ceiling…
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Just the thought of having giant numbers on the ceiling constantly telling me what time it is nearly makes me panic! I have to work really hard to not look at the clock when I wake up at night, because it just stresses me out more!

shudder

31

I do get occasional insomnia, nowhere near as much as you folks. I’m a pretty light sleeper, so even muscle aches from excessive (for me) strenuous activity will keep me from sleeping soundly.

This quote from Macbeth is so true:

There is just nothing like a good night’s sleep. And if you don’t get that, everything else suffers.

32

Reading this thread makes me really, really happy to be a regular sleeper and dreamer. Of course, now I’ve got ‘Do You Believe In Magic?’ in my head, and really, the lyrics are kind of weird. ‘Your feet start tapping/And you can’t seem to find/How you got there/So just blow your mind’

33

I’ve been an insomniac since around 91 when I got out of the Army. I’ve tried every OTC and prescription sleep aid, spent years drinking myself to “sleep,” had every test known to man, and finally given up and I just stay awake most of the time. Giving up really helped, as I no longer look at the clock or worry about how bad I’ll feel the next day, so I get to sleep sooner than I would have otherwise. Still, I consider 4 hours of sleep a night a huge victrory.

The one sleep aid that does help occasionally is Lorazepam, which is a muscle relaxant as well as a sedative, and usually knocks me out within a few hours if I exceed the reccomened dose slightly. When it works, I’ll sleep for 8 hours or so, and only wake up a few times. I hesitate to take it though, because like all the other sleep aids that I have tried, if I take it and don’t sleep, I’m groggy until the next time I get to sleep.

IANAD, and this is in no way meant to convey medical advice

34

Another life-long insomniac checking in. I’d just like to start off with my bitter whine about how every important event in my entire life has been marred by my exhaustion.

First day of kindergarten? Exhausted and cranky as a cat in a bathtub. Big test in long division in fourth grade? Completely wiped out. SAT’s in high school? Pfffft. Fell asleep during the math portion. Job interview, big presentations, first day at a new job, my wedding day, you name it, I’m NOT up for it. I’m tired and crabby and I look like HELL.

Once every year or two I sleep for more than 5 hours straight, and it’s pure heaven. I wonder what my life would have been like if I actually slept at night.