I’ve stopped drinking. I got sick of being ‘that person’ and feeling like crap every day (and guilty).
Don’t make a big deal about it. I just came here to ask fellow quitters, or people in similar situations. When can I expect to experience some quality sleep?
At the moment I lie awake reading a book, with tired eyes and itchy body feeling a bit fed up and bored, and not at all sleepy (just tired eyes).
I am confident I will get used to it, and it will get back to normal. I just wonder when that will happen.
I’ll generally experience insomnia as an alcohol withdrawal reaction after say, a weekend of heavy drinking. Many sober Sunday nights were awful, often facing Monday morning on no sleep. I’d’ve almost been better off just drinking more and going in to work with a hangover, about the same level of functioning! But, Ambien to the rescue, what a lifesaver its been for me, to not have to worry about sleep and having to get up for work without adequate rest. You might want to consider discussing with your doctor if " better living through chemistry" might be a short term symptom management strategy until your brain biochemistry reboots.
Ambien is the only thing I have found, other than a week of hating life and being insomniac.
I no longer use it though- I apparently went out to a bar with my roommate and had no knowledge of the evening after taking one and not going directly to bed.
I find that after four to five days of not drinking, it becomes natural to go lie down and fall asleep. I am usually not tired, but if I lay down and close my eyes in the dark, I will fall asleep.
Then it is just a matter of following the schedule.
Depends on how much you drank, how long you were drinking for, when you quit, what other drugs were and are in your system, other associated medical conditions, etc. etc.
Basic advice to folks trying to get better sleep: Get regular daily aerobic exercise (but not within a few hours of bedtime), keep regular hours of rising and going to bed, and don’t eat heavily before going to bed. Also minimize caffeine, especially after noon.
I remember reading an article about the myth of turkey making one sleepy. I remember the article specifically stating that’s it’s not so much the tryptophan in turkey that makes one sleepy but rather having a full stomach itself. The logic was that blood was being drawn to the digestive system and away from the brain causing sleepyness.
While going to bed hungry is not helpful in fighting insomnia, neither is eating a large meal shortly before bed. A light snack is recommended if food is desired.
In my experience, if you regularly drink to the point of intoxication, and by regularly I mean daily, you hit a point where you are not so much falling asleep and waking up as you are passing out and coming to, generally to the sound of the alarm clock you set while sober the night before.
The process of going to sleep while drunk is quite simple: at some point you realize you need to go to bed now because you are going to be asleep very very soon, whether you’re in bed or not. This doesn’t have to happen in an alley, mind, it can nicely coincide with the end of The Daily Show when you move from the couch to the bed.
When you stop drinking, there is no clear signal that now is the time to go to bed, so you pick a number from the clock and go to bed then. Your body doesn’t seem to realize that it’s time to sleep, and your mind isn’t quietly muttering in the background behind the buzz, it’s going full blast right at the front of your head. You lay there for an hour, and another hour, and eventually you start to drift off but you’ve lost the knack for going to sleep, so you keep jerking back into consciousness. It really is like regaining a skill you’ve let languish.
If you decide that’s enough of that and go back to the booze, the sleep problem goes away. You are no longer insomniac, you’re just hung over. Your body and mind remember how to go to sleep under those conditions.
I often remark how I love these SDMB coincidences. I had to see my doctor today for my 6 monthly check and scripts. My one complaint was that, since I stopped heavy drinking about 5 months ago, I don’t seem to sleep as heavily because I am tired all day.
He figures that I probably have sleep apnoea and that, much in the manner described by 3trew, my bottle of bourbon each night bombed me out just fine so that I awake refreshed. Hungover but refreshed.
Off for a sleep study for me. Actually, interestingly enough, they do them at your home now. You are given the gear which records your sleep and you plug yourself in and drop the device off afterwards for analysis. Only costs $10.
Just make sure that you haven’t gone deep enough into the bottle to significantly change your body/brain chemistry. Stopping heavy alcohol use abruptly can cause seizures (petit mal & grand mal) & even death.
I’ve had both types of seizure and ended up hospitalized until I finally ended up in rehab and am now clean & sober (for 1.5 yrs).
If you get the DT’s - uncontrollable tremors 48-96 hrs after your last drink, head for the ER…or call the EMT’s. You really DON’T want the seizures! I dislocated my shoulder during my last set…
Serious alcohol abuse causes some pretty severe nervous system damage. You are young enough that almost all of it should be reversible but it takes a while. A rule of thumb is that things will take 6 - 18 months for your body to sort things out. That doesn’t mean that you won’t get good sleep for that long but you may notice residual symptoms for quite a while. Buy some good multivitamins and take them daily, especially the B-vitamins. Most really heavy drinkers develop some degree of malnutritution for a variety of reasons.
My ‘relationship’ with alcohol is strange. (Or at least it is compared to what I hear about typical Abuse)
I am not physically/chemically dependent on it. When I do/have ‘fallen off the wagon’ it’s a moment of mental weakness rather than through any physiological urge to drink.
In other words I can stop drinking and suffer almost no physical effects of doing so.
And when I’m sober, picking an ‘oclock’ to go to bed is not something I do. What I do is resign myself to the fact that I am probably not going to get to sleep for hours, so I stay up. When I get tired I lie on the bed. If doing that ‘wakes me up’ (as being relaxed ironically tends to do, because my brain gets a chance to thinkaboutlotsofthingsallatonceoverandoverconstantly) I simply get off the bed and carry on doing whatever I was doing. Eventually I finish doing what I was doing, get on the bed, and read. Eventually I do fall asleep.
ETA: Another reason I fall off the wagon is I get sick of worrying about all the things that might go wrong in life. I’m intelligent and logical, which is why it baffles me when I’ll choose to do something stupid like binge-drink, thus making life worse, because I’m worrying about how bad life is.
As one who recently decided to cut back a lot, (I may be an alcoholic) my doctor, after shaking my hand, suggested that I would probably experience some anxiety and insomnia and that people sometimes fall off the wagon due to these affects.
So now I have a 'scrip for Temazepam 15 mg to help me sleep, and Lorazepam .5 mg to help with the anxiety. I don’t use either all the time although I do take the sleeping potion most evenings.
Maybe you could talk to your doc about this kind of treatment?
In my experience, those medications are not good for actual alcoholics, as they are quite active in the alcoholic brain in a very similar way that alcohol is.
Unfortunately, many physicians still consider alcohol to be a benzodiazepine deficiency. Benzos are life-saving for an alcoholic in withdrawal, but after that tend to potentiate the illness.
(this reflects the general stance of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, too)
