Yes, this. I have to use them because my DH can be heard throughout the house with his snoring; there is no escaping. But my heartbeat, argh, I don’t want to hear that either. I have managed some sleep positions that avoid this. But I have found that I tend to fall asleep faster when there is something playing in the background. It makes my brain stop angsting. I can fall asleep in front of the loud TV easily but in the darkness and quietness, with no sound but my heart, I can’t sleep.
To avoid hearing your heartbeat try getting your ear out from the pillow, just underneath, where your face is still there. It’s complicated and I’m still trying to master it.
See if you can learn some relaxation techniques to use. It should help with your anxiety, too–bonus! Look for CDs or downloads labeled “guided relaxation.”
I volunteer with an anxiety support group, and almost everyone who starts coming to the group has trouble sleeping as a symptom.
Relaxation techniques are great - people with anxiety need to learn how to relax (I mean literally - they need to learn the skills of how to relax your body!). I also recommend meditation and/or yoga to everyone. Relaxation techniques seem to be very good at helping you fall asleep, but meditation seems to be better at turning your brain back off at 3 in the morning.
“My Dr. has given me some zopiclone but I’ve not taken it yet. I’d rather stay off the heavy duty stuff until I’ve exhausted all other options. Has anyone else had any experience with zopiclone? How effective did you find it?”
Your sleep experiences sound similar to mine though I initially fall asleep very quickly. I got a prescription to zopiclone and I was on it for about three months. One of its possible side effects is depression and it can also cause aggression. It caused those in me with a vengeance in the last few weeks and I had to stop. What I found about it was not that it gave me quality sleep but that it was nice not being awake for long stretches of time at 2:00 am. But the cost, in terms of side effects, was unacceptable to me. It may not affect you that way but I recommend being very vigilent of your own behaviour. I was only taking half of a 7.5mg tablet during my early morning wake up.
My sleep is still crap but there it is. Best of luck.
So true!! I need some kind of noise / sound to keep my brain from waking itself up. TV turned to something like the Discovery Channel works well. Though I’ve found if I leave the TV on all night, it disturbs my sleep, so a sleep-timer (or the iPod solution with a snooze timer) works well.
Husband’s snoring: has he had a sleep study? Chances are good that he has some degree of apnea. I’ve posted elsewhere that my husband’s sleep study and subsequent CPAP machine have helped me sleep better :).
Yeah, he has. He has a serious case of sleep apnea. He has a CPAP that he won’t use. It drains water down his throat, he says, which wakes him up. Apparently the not breathing part doesn’t wake him up at all, and I have observed it.
He uses it when we go on vacations though and have to share a room.
Just a thought, if you enjoy that sort of thing: I find that doing really hard Sudoku puzzles helps me “turn off”. A low dose of aspirin an hour or two before bed helps, too.
I got melatonin from a friend going to the States and I found it gave me horrible nightmares and kind of panicky when I was awake.
The OTC medication Nytol (not the herbal variety which is just valerian and does shit-all) is extremely effective, but it also left me feeling weird and ‘not myself’ for the first half of the day after. I can’t actually believe they sell that stuff in Boots.
The most effective thing I’ve ever found, however, is Radio 4. If you can’t sleep it’s interesting, but usually the burbling chatter helps me focus on something that isn’t my own tiresome brain, and allows me to drop off. Since the advent of the smartphone, I’ve bought the amazing TuneIn app, which has a ‘sleep timer’ function that switches it off after a certain number of minutes to avoid the phenomenon of a particularly raucous or interesting article waking me up again. I have to switch it back on again when I wake up around 3am, which I often do.
However I’ve recently ‘learned how to sleep’. I have recently occasionally been sleeping between 6 and 8 hours without waking up in the middle of the night. My ‘trick’ is no alcohol for prolonged periods of time, cardboard taped all over my windows, and living somewhere that is nearly silent.
I am moving soon to a place on a quieter street with no street lamps right outside my window, with no musty odor in my bedroom, and I quit my suck-ass job. So I’m hoping that my sleep will improve. ::crosses fingers::
I remember the days (a mere two years ago) when I would get tired and go to bed. And that’s it. Eight hours later I’d get up. Now sleep is a huge fucking production. Gotta be mindful of when I last eat so my meds will work. Can’t stay out too late or my meds won’t work. Have to take them in the right order and at juuuuust the right intervals or my meds won’t work. Have to use a sleep mask or it won’t make a difference that I took my meds. Have to use ear plugs, the whole nine yards. And then I still wake up at 3:00AM and 5:00AM and don’t sleep well when I am sleeping.
I just want to go to sleep and sleep deeply and well for one fucking night. That would be heaven.
For centuries, it was completely accepted as normal that one would sleep for ~4 hours, then get up and do stuff in the middle of the night, then go back to bed and sleep another ~4 hours. Recently if I have woken in the small hours I’ve just gone “ah, it’s just the first sleep”, read a book or something for a while, and then had my ‘second sleep’. Even the placebo of thinking that what I was experiencing is normal helped to reassure me and made me more relaxed and therefore more able to sleep.
As an apartment dweller, I’ve found that earplugs make me nervous, plus I don’t like things in my ears, plus hearing my own breathing/heartbeat is distracting. Yet I need something to mask the sounds of neighbors and car horns, and of my cats having a bath, using the litterbox, and on the list goes. I’m a good sleeper, but fairly light, so things wake me up.
I burned a “white noise” CD for a whole dollar, and play it on repeat when I go to bed. The BEST thing I ever did. Cheaper than a dedicated white noise maker or box fan, and not an extra thing in the bedroom, just play on the CD player that’s already in there. I sleep like a baby, and if I wake up, it soothes me back to sleep. It’s a nice, constant noise, rather than a TV or radio, that can just be played on repeat until it’s time to get up. I even sleep through the morning hubub the new neighbors and their barking dogs make at 8am, and the one blasted car alarm that goes off over and over some nights.
So, this might not really help the OP much, but since so many others have mentioned dislike for earplugs and the need for a masking sound to help them sleep, I’ve found this far better than TV or radio. Find a 60-minute track on iTunes or whatever music service you use (some are less than 10 min which seems useless), preview the track to see if it’s in the tonal range you like (I like a deeper sound, some like something more like radio static), burn it, and you’ve got years of use for a dollar or less. They even have ones you can buy that are other “known” white noise type sounds, like a fan or a vacuum cleaner. I don’t use the “nature” sounds because, like my own breathing, they wax and wane and for me it’s distracting rather than relaxing.
Suggest to him that there are ways of dealing with rainout / condensation, including insulated hoses, modifying the humidifier settings, or getting a heated hose - some CPAP threads here have ideas and I suspect there are suggestions at apneasupport.org.
Melatonin is definitely not a placebo. It really does work. I used to have regular insomnia, and I got maybe 6 hours of sleep a night. With melatonin, I can get a good 8 hours of sleep. I do have weird dreams sometimes, but they’re not nightmarish or upsetting. It’s good stuff.
I had that same experience last night. I woke up after about four hours of sleep, got up, went to the bathroom, and just went back to bed, thinking, “Well, that was the first sleep. Now let’s see about the second one.” It was reassuring and relaxing to know that that is a normal sleep pattern.