Trouble sleeping.

I have a child on the autism spectrum with sleep issues. Get yourself some professional help. You take meds and have anxiety issues. There are plenty of people that help you with sleep coping strategies. I’ve interacted with them for many years and it’s been generally productive. They probably won’t have a silver bullet for you, but do work with you to figure out what will work for you. Heck, it can be something as simple as going to bed 30 minutes earlier (or conversely 30 minutes later), listening to a boring podcast or ambient noise, changing your meds, having you get up at a fixed time every morning, etc. It may make sense to do a sleep study.

You live at home. Are you still of the age where you can go to a Children’s Hospital? Most have sleep clinics.

My point being your self diagnosis isn’t working and you should go to a professional instead of this message board.

Those are meds that tend to make you drowsy, if anything, IIRC.

Personally, I take a regimen of meds to be able to sleep, and I have the sleep studies to prove I need them. There’s no shame in needing something to help you sleep, but you should discuss it with the person who prescribes your other meds. You don’t want to be taking something habit-forming like Ambien every night, and is just knocking you out. You want something that helps set your circadian rhythms, and keep your brain forming the neurotransmitters it needs to be awake or asleep at the right times.

Killer insomnia (no meds, no sleep) since 1962.

See “Sleep Hygiene”.

“Sleep” clinics make a fortune by reciting about 10-12 “Rules for Good Sleep”.

Save a bunch and see Google instead.

Honestly, it sounds like you may be developing an obsessive compulsion around sleeping. Please talk to a therapist about it. OCD is actually very treatable. Look up ‘‘habit reversal training.’’

OTOH, I’ve suffered with insomnia for most of my life and I’ve yet to find a cure-all. My brain just won’t stop working.

Alright, I didn’t look at my alarm clock as much last night, and I slept well.

Though, I could have slept well because I was so sleepy from having trouble sleeping three nights in a row.

Sometimes that’s the best we got. I hope things shape up soon.

I’m most surprised at how easy it was to not look at the alarm clock.

I expected that to drive me crazy.

I think I just looked at it during the final minutes until 10:30.

Also, I went to bed at 9:30 instead of my usual 9:12.

I could have written these words verbatim. I don’t really have anything else to add besides it sucks!

How do you deal with your insomnia?

I take five medications. OTC melatonin is the only one that is actually a sleep medication. One is an old-school ADHD med, one is a tricyclic (old-school) antidepressant, one is an antipsychotic, and one is an anticonvulsant. The second two are pretty new. I take very low doses of them-- in fact, except for the anticonvulsant, none of them would be very effective for the conditions they are first-line drugs for at the doses I take.

The ADHD drug keeps me from “micronapping” during the day, where you can sleep for less than a minute and not even be aware of it, several times during the day (this is something that happens to hardcore insomniacs who are running on four days with a total of ten hours of sleep). The tricyclic keeps my mind from racing when I’m trying to relax and fall asleep-- it also keeps me from worrying so much about not sleeping that I worry myself into wakefulness, and tricyclics have drowsiness as a side effect, but they are not habit-forming in the way that sedatives and narcotics are-- they also make you drowsy, but don’t interfere with you actually sleeping-- you aren’t just sleeping off the drug, in other words. The anticonvulsant partially suppresses my startle reflex, because I startle several times during the night, particularly when I go into REM sleep. Sometimes I startle into full wakefulness, and sometimes just out of REM, which is the really restful part of sleep. The antipsychotic somehow seems to promote REM sleep and make my sleep more efficient and effective, so I feel very rested when I wake up.

The melatonin helps push me over the edge into actually falling asleep.

That’s how I get to sleep.

It took several years of experimenting to get the right mix of drugs, and the right dosages, but it’s been working for 15 years. I had to take a break when I was pregnant, and ended up having to quit work early because my sleep got so screwed up-- but then in the last trimester just being pregnant made me tired, and I slept a lot.

I have two PRNs, Ambien and clonazepam. I rarely take them-- mostly when I’m jet-lagged, if I have to get up very early, so I need to get to sleep at say, 7pm (if I have to drive safely in the wee hours the next morning, say), or if my sleep gets screwed up by an illness-- like two months ago when I had a stomach bug and was taking phenergan which made me sleep a lot, and then I couldn’t get to sleep when I stopped taking it, or once years ago when I had to take steroids, and they kept me awake.

I get 30 5mg Ambien a month (most people get 10mg), and I can take one or two. I think I last filled it last November. I need to check and see when the Rx expires and fill it once just before that. I have 60 .5mg clonazepam a month, and can take 1-4. It also says “as needed for sleep or anxiety” on the bottle, because I’m allowed to take it before I go to the dentist, as long as I have a ride home. The last time I took more than one was to sleep on an airplane two years ago.

I’m not cured, but I’m “effectively treated,” like a diabetic whose blood sugar is well under control with diet, insulin, medication, or whatever combination works.

All the meds are pretty cheap. They all cost just a couple of dollars a month, except the antipsychotic, which just became available generic last year, and still costs 16 dollars a month. I think my insurance pays a lot more.

So yes, it is possible to control even really difficult, hardwired insomnia. But you need to see a psychiatrist or neurologist who knows about sleep. You need a sleep study to ferret out unusual patterns in your nocturnal brain waves, and start there.

I think my sleep problems are mostly just anxiety.

It depends. I take an anti-depressant called Trintellex, which has a sedative effect, and lately, I’ve been dosing myself with sublingual liquid melatonin (the pills do nothing for me.) Sometimes I drink calming tea and take a bath. I use a blue-light blocker on all my electronics (Flux for Mac & PC, Twilight for Android.) Sometimes I give up and work on my novel, so at least something’s getting done. I also have Ativan to take as needed, but I do my best not to make it habit-forming due to the addictive nature of benzos. I’ve used lucid dreaming tracks at times, which don’t give me lucid dreams but they do seem to help me fall asleep. I take Tylenol PM.

To be frank, the Straight Dope and insomnia don’t mix well at all. I’m going to have to go back to blocking my internet past a certain evening hour (I use a program called Cold Turkey.) At one point I had it so that no electronics were being used in my bedroom at night, but I actually find trying to work on my book helps me fall asleep sometimes.

(ETA: I also have ADHD (inattentive), anxiety, and PTSD-related sleep disturbances. But even on nights when I’m not upset about something, I can’t shut my brain off.)

Another thing I’d say is worry less about getting to sleep and concentrate on resting. I’ll get really comfortable and just think about how comfortable I am and thatevenifmymindismoving90mph, my body is resting. An appropriate meditation technique to go along would be not to try to still your mind, but to let go of ideas and conversations. When you catch yourself thinking about something, let it go. Don’t beat yourself up, don’t get upset about anything, just let go of the train of thought and rest. And just keep doing that, allowing your mind to wander but not linger on anything, while you rest.

Should I stop taking the sleep formula stuff?