Oh, my fucking gawd does insomnia suck

The BBQ Pit
1

Tried going to bed early tonight, on zolpidem. Slept from 9pm to about midnight. Last night, didn’t take any extra meds, and didn’t fall asleep until 5am.

Have managed to binge-watch Xena: Warrior Princess, which I hadn’t seen since the original run (didn’t watch the last two, though), defeat the blue dragon (Playstation game), and prepare all my lesson for Hebrew school through the end of Sukkot. Labs too. Read the entire Spanish novel that’s assigned for class over the next 9 weeks. That probably wasn’t a good call, because I won’t remember any of it by the time we get to the end of class.

I really need to clean my kitchen, but I’ve been putting that off on the grounds that I might make noise and disturb the neighbors.

What’s really driving me crazy is that I have all this nervous energy at night when I’m not sleeping; during the day, I’m just fucking exhausted. I’m afraid to drive anywhere, because I might drift off in the car.

Last week, I slept for six glorious hours in a row on Thursday, because I didn’t have to work, but that isn’t going to happen every day, and I think getting into the habit of sleeping during the day and being awake at night is a bad idea.

Before Covid, I’d gotten myself on a pretty good schedule where I was sleeping from about 7pm to 1am, and then getting up and doing stuff-- laundry, dishes. Occasionally I’d go back to bed around 5 and sleep another hour. DH wasn’t that crazy about the schedule, but I was less crazy, and that was good for him. It required something to do during the day, like work, that started relatively early.

Thinking about taking the dog for a walk, since it’s stopped raining.

Also thinking about taking a handful of zolpidem just to see what happens, since I seem to be resistant to it.

Has anyone else been so tired it actually hurts? It hurts to be this tired-- you’d think that at this point I’d sleep from total exhaustion, but nope. When I woke up at midnight, I started shaking, I felt so awful. It took a couple of minutes to stop. Would Tylenol make me feel better?

I wonder what’s on TV?

If I don’t post again, then you know it’s possible to actually die from tiredness.

2

Aye: insomnia sucks.

3

Fellow sufferer here. For no earthly reason, I developed anxiety and insomnia circa 2003. What followed was a months long nightmare. I was prescribed Lunesta, Ambien, at least three others. Every med I tried worked like a charm for 2-3 nights, then stopped working at all. Then I’d be UP. I remember being awake for 3 days at a crack several times, though “awake” is a generous description.

I finally found a patient psychiatrist, but there was still months of experimentation with antidepressants before a good solution was found. It turns out antidepressants have an “opposite day” effect on me: they make me more anxious instead of less. Now I take an atypical antipsychotic about 10 pm every night, and 30-60 minutes later I hit the hay, read a book for a bit, and I’m out for 6-8 hours. Bliss.

Oh good god. Please don’t.

4

It truly sucks. I’ve found no good answer.
A few years ago I just quit fighting it. I sleep at odd times.
It’s not an ideal solution, at all. But at least I don’t feel guilty about it anymore.

Good luck.

5

Insomnia is simultaneously the best and worst part of long-standing PTSD. At least for me it is. I like how Comedy Central does long, bingeable runs of the same show(s) throughout the day.

6

I hit that for a while. I decided I didn’t need to sleep 8 hours a night, and what I slept was what I slept, and amazingly, once the pressure was off, I went from 3-4 hours a night to six, and sometimes seven.

I was doing well for years on a mix of meds that includes an anticonvulsant, in a pretty big dose, and an antipsychotic in a very small dose, with zolpidem as a back-up (I get 10 a month, and they piled up, so that I actually had over 100 saved-- hey, insurance pays, so I filled it every month, because you never know).

This is partly cyclic, and partly COVID-19. Not having a regular schedule, nor something particular to go to in the morning has not been good for me.

I hate to go to bed at night, because of bad memories from my 20s of lying there for hours, and crying because I couldn’t sleep, and getting up again after no sleep whatsoever, feeling like my head was full of sand. When I know there’s no reason to go to bed at a particular time, because there’s no reason to get up at a particular time, it really messes with my head.

7

I hear you. Nothing is worse than laying there in the dark and being wide awake.

Can you fake yourself out. Schedule stuff you need to do, early mornings. Set an alarm.

8

Tried it. Nope.

I have discovered that my most restful sleep comes when I have vivid dreams. I mentioned this to the doctor.

9

Yes.

I have a couple times in my life experienced horrific insomnia - the sort were you sleep only every other day, or even every third day. Awake for stretches of more than 40 or even more than 50 hours at a time. It is torture.

When it gets that bad I go to a doctor.

The good news, in my case (if you can call it that) is that it has so far always been linked to an external stressor. Usually of catastrophic proportions. The bad news is that you can’t deal with these when you’re completely exhausted yet can’t sleep.

A carefully planned program of sleep encouraging pharmaceuticals has, so far, helped me get enough rest so I can deal with the problem(s) and remove the stress. Eventually. In the most recent case it lasted over two years but I was able to remain functional enough to keep my job and take care of myself and the parrots.

I had to try a couple different meds, too. What worked during an episode in 2007 turned out to be not the best for early widowhood followed shortly by loss of home, as an example.

Happy to say I’m getting better and have normal sleep without pharmaceuticals more often than not. Getting back to normal, although apparently I’m settling into a “normal” post-menopausal sleep pattern (not sleeping as deeply/soundly, prone to waking, basically “old people sleep”)

I’m sorry to hear you’re going through this. Insomnia is absolutely miserable.

10

It’s not an external stressor. It’s my own fucking brain conspiring against me. It doesn’t like to sleep.

I’ve had sleep studies done, and the result is that my sleep patterns are highly irregular. Among other things, I’m a light sleeper who startles easily, and I actually startle awake from the shock of going into REM sleep frequently. That’s what the anticonvulsant prevents, and it works, to a great extent.

When I first started taking it, I was having all sorts of crazy, vivid dreams, and actually, not sleeping that much-- maybe six hours a night, but feeling really rested, because most of my sleep was REM sleep, as I had a lot to make up for.

It’s counter-intuitive, but the more vividly I dream, the more rested I feel when I wake up. A lot of the last-hour grabs at sleep I get from 4:30-6am, approximately, are usually wild rides as far as dreaming goes, and they’re the best sleep I get of the night.

There have been several studies on sleep deprivation in normal people, and the first thing that happens is they get a higher proportion of REM sleep, and less of the other stages of sleep. As sleep deprivation gets more severe, they start having waking hallucinations, that appear to be their brains trying to get dream-time in when they are awake.

After a particularly bad night on top of other bad night, I sometimes see things. In my peripheral vision, and I are fully aware of the fact they are not real, but by gawd do they look real.

I’m especially peeved right now, because this was under good control for a long time, but it’s spiraling away right now, and I don’t know what to do.

I’ve been tired before-- I’ve been in military basic training, and I’ve coped with a newborn, but neither compared to my own brain fighting against me.

11

(Obligatory poor-taste joke:) Insomnia? Eh, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. :rofl:

I’ve only had 3 or 4 instances in my life where I couldn’t get to sleep, but can you explain to me how 8 hours of just laying there can feel like a solid week? Conversely, how can what feels like a 15 minute nap actually be a 4 hour snooze? Sleep be weird.

12

One of the horrible things about insomnia, is that you worry about not getting any sleep, and that very worry keeps you awake.

For a long time, having zolpidem (Ambien) in the house, even if I rarely, rarely took it, helped me sleep, because knowing I had the option broke that cycle of OMG! What if I can’t sleep tonight? I had a deal with myself that if I didn’t fall asleep in an hour, or if I woke up after less than three, I could take a zolpidem. The psychological effect of that was immense.

13

Insomnia sucks, for sure. A pity it doesn’t take us to that different level of reality that it took Ralph Roberts to in Stephen King’s novel “Insomnia”. That’d make it interesting, at least.

14

Curious if you’ve tried a weighted blanket. I finally did after suffering disturbed sleep and was surprised that it worked.

(I made my own as fleece would be way too hot for me, I used a cotton sarong and beach pebbles.)

I don’t sleep till noon or anything. And I still get up a few times in the night. But now, when I go back to bed I fall into actual restive sleep, which wasn’t happening before. I no longer wake at 3 or 4, but mostly 6 or just after.

I know it doesn’t sound like much difference in hours, because it’s only maybe 90 mins more. But the weighted blanket really made sure I got a better quality sleep. And that made all the difference for me!

Good Luck!

15

Naw, that joke was perfect. Put me right out. Eyes rolls make me soooo tired.

Eh?

Eh?

Nah, we’re just playin’ off each other.

16

My particular hell is I have extreme nerve pain at night. It is apparently fairly common for nerve pain to worsen when you lie down at night (who knew). The only thing that deals with the pain effectively is opiates. I have a paradoxical reaction to opiates - they hype me up. So I just lie there and call it ‘rest’. Whee!

17

I have seen the effects of this on others, and it appears to me to come with anxiety disorders - and it looks totally devastating.

I have heard of something called sleep or rest hygiene which appears to be a systematic way of reducing the number or levels of stimulus along with conditioning - especially in relation to time and location - the idea is supposed to be that certain times and places such as bedrooms and beds become sleep sterile.

Anyway, you have my appreciation of your problems and you are not alone at all, some of my friends have had similar issues - and those were mainly centred around certain life events and did eventualy moderate themselves

18

This is a brain-based problem I’ve had since I was 16 years old. Anti-anxiety medicine doesn’t help, except when there’s external anxiety exacerbating the problem. Sleep hygiene is irrelevant, because it’s not the problem, although I have submitted to it five different times, including having sleep specialists actually come to my home and advise me on rearranging furniture, getting different pillows-- the body pillow did make the long hours of wakefulness a little more comfortable, but didn’t help me to sleep at all. The single thing that seemed to help a little was the white noise machine, which helped me stay asleep once I fell asleep, but didn’t seem to make me fall asleep any faster.

One sleep specialist did have a good insight that I was getting up more times than what she thought was typical to pee, and got me a Detrol prescription, so I didn’t have to struggle to get back to sleep as many times after peeing, but that was just a small piece in a big puzzle.

Sleep specialists always said TV was absolutely forbidden in the bedroom-- that it was like chocolate for a dog. So I didn’t discover until my 40s that voices in the background were a wonderful distraction from my mind racing. You can have the sound on, on a TV, and the picture off, and a playlist of shows you’ve seen before, so following the plot closely isn’t distracting, Most TVs even have a setting that turns them off after an hour or two.

A couple of Law & Order reruns I’d seen a million times before could shut my brain down pretty effectively. Later, so could The Big Bang Theory.

Now I just lie when sleep doctors ask if I ever fall asleep with the TV on.

The basic problem with reducing stimuli is that my brain creates it when there’s nothing external. I’m constantly battling my brain to get it to shut up and let me get some rest. Medication helps, but doesn’t do everything. The problem I’m facing is getting the correct amount of external stimuli-- enough to keep my brain shut down, but not enough to keep me awake on it’s own.

19

The brain racing on a million tracks at once sounds so much like ADD, but I assume you’ve already been checked for that. My sympathies. It sounds like hell.

20

My weighted blanket has helped me quite a bit. I get restless legs at night and the extra weight seems to calm things down.