Hello fellow dopers! I recently quit a habit that as a secondary helped me sleep. I’m not normally a troubled sleeper, but I slept poorly last night and expect to do so the next few nights. Are there any supplements or remedies you would recommend that would help keep me asleep through the night? I am not interested in something habit forming or something that will literally knock me out.
On a side note, I usually wake a few time (around 2am to 6am) with the urge to pee. Usually I ignore it and go back to sleep. I stay away from caffeine after noon, I go right before bed, but still it persists. Is there any recommendation outside of just “letting go”? Hahaha
Melatonin works great for my son. We had tried Benadryl but it had the opposite effect on him, it made him wired. I used to buy the “Midnite” brand but they wer expensive per dose; now I just get the generic melatonin at Walmart in the vitamin section. I give it to him about an hour before bedtime, it has really helped!
I’ve been having sleep issues for a week or so, after not having them for a long while. Not having the problems allowed me to be lazy about “sleep readiness.”
Here are the things that have helped me:
[ul]
[li]closing the curtains. Yeah, really. It makes a huge difference. Who knew?[/li][li]ear plugs - dogs across the back fence, loud inconsiderate neighbors downstairs[/li][li]breathe right strip - I may look ridiculous, but I sleep soundly[/li][li] melatonin - 500mcg chewable peppermint flavored tablets from Trader Joe’s[/li][/ul]
The nurse practitioner who recommended I try melatonin suggested having a cup of chamomile tea at the same time. I did find it restful, but had to get up from a deep sleep to pee so I stopped doing that.
Light in your bedroom is a big culprit for preventing people from getting a good, restful night’s sleep, I think. Since I’ve started sleeping with a sleep mask over my eyes, I can’t believe how long I stay asleep in a good, solid sleep. There actually is a biological reason for this - apparently having too much light in your bedroom at night reduces the amount of serotonin you make, the serotonin being part of what keeps you asleep (that’s my layman understanding of the process).
I agree whole-heartedly on making sure the bedroom is setup for a good night’s rest. I have my monitor set to dim at 10:00, And I switch to candles instead of lights before bed. No light enters the room while asleep.
I took 3mg of melatonin last night, an hour before bed. I went to sleep faster than I normally do. However, I still woke up in the middle of the night, after an awful nightmare.
It was so odd - my mother, years younger, was yelling at my girlfriend and I for no reason. Since my mother, my girlfriend, and I all get along quite well I was very upset. At the peak of the argument it stopped making sense to me, and I started to lose my fear. I guess my brain didn’t like that because the next thing in my dream an alien spacecraft came crashing through the clouds, and despite everything I had in me I COULDN’T SCREAM!
I woke up and suppressed the urge to scream. I rolled over a few times, feeling like I needed to use the bathroom (maybe 60% urgency). I figured it could wait, but ended up rolling on and off until my alarm went off.
I really think the urge to urinate is negatively effecting my sleep. And again I DON’T have caffeine after noon, or any beverage after 8 (bed at 11). So I’m trying to figure out what else I can do to help that.
Would a time-release melatonin help? It seemed to help my first half, maybe time release would spread it out…?
The urge to go can be a powerful thing. Mine keeps me up as well, I used to try to ignore it like you but now I get up and go relieve myself. Particularly if I’ve been dreaming that I need to find a bathroom.
I have a very dim night light in the bathroom and can get up, pee, go back to bed and asleep without fully waking up. It’s my experience that as we … um … mature, we all need to get up and pee in the night so you might as well get good at doing it without waking up all the way.
Hahahha - in particularly horrible dreams I will find the bathroom, start to urinate, and to my terror there is no relief! I go and I go and I go but nothing! If anything the urge gets worse!
Then I wake up and realize - Ohhhh, no wonder the relief was out of my grasp.
I often get up and take the opportunity, but it can be a real pain. I’ve stepped on sharp things, slammed into the closet thinking it was the doorway, etc etc.
I have honestly considered a chamber pot, but at 26…I just can’t approach the Ick factor yet. Maybe after 30
Yep. Our bathroom has one outlet, which is on the side of the cabinet mirror. In that outlet is a three way adapter and a light sensitive night light. Bathroom light goes on and night light goes out.
I’ve also seen bathrooms with a dimmer switch.
When I had my apartment, I didn’t bother with any lights when I got up in the middle of the night. Got so much from the street lights that I didn’t even bother to replace the bulb in the fridge!
I’ve heard that we sleep in segments anyway (not for eight hours straight - more like three or four hours at a time), so when I wake up and need to pee, I just get up and go - I also hate those “trying to find a bathroom but can’t” or “trying to pee but can’t” dreams.
Well, I tried an extended release, 10mg. Bad idea.
I still woke up in the middle of the night with a slight case of the jimmy legs, and tossed and turned until 6:45, when my alarm went off. I hit the snooze and ironically enough got an hour 25 of good sleep before I HAD to get up for work. The 10mg was too much, however, as I’m half asleep at work. Hmmmmm…
Now I’m looking down another avenue: perhaps my sleep is being disrupted by Restless Leg Syndrome.
I frequently wake in the middle of the night with the urge to urinate and assumed it was the urge to urinate that caused me to wake. Now, analyzing it more and more, I am beginning to think I have RLS “jimmy legs” and that wakes me up and I assume it is the urge to go keeping me up.
In fact the more I think about it the more I associate the two. As a kid I often found jimmying my legs relieved the urge to go a bit. So I always assumed the jimmy legs was BECAUSE I had to go, not the other way around.
Normally I can make up for sleep, and I’m not so stressed, so I didn’t think much about it.
But it has been a stressful week, and last night I noticed that even after going to the bathroom my legs were shuffling back and forth.
My 10pm bedtime routine is: no food after 8pm, a generic Benadryl around 8pm and after applying a Breathe Right-style strip re-read a familiar book for 10-15 minutes in bed before turning out the light. Any light gets blocked by something so it’s pitch black in the room. My problem was having a hard time falling asleep b/c of racing thoughts and then having upsetting dreams that kept me from restful sleep, as I woke up to end them a few times a night. I can’t have any noise, though I know some who must have white noise to sleep soundly.
Melatonin has been shown to cause very weird dreams in high doses. I take 5mg every once in a while and almost always have a very weird dream, I just remind myself, it’s the melatonin. Some people enjoy these weird dreams and purposely take higher dosage to enhance it. Haha.
