Insomnia in the Playground

[DeadManSleeping]

There's probably a thread like this far back in the archives somewhere...

Anyway, I do not have insomnia, strictly speaking. I do sleep from around 5-10 hours every night (usually less than 8). I do still have an issue, though. No matter what, and I do mean no matter what, I am unable to fall asleep quickly. Come 10 PM, I can be tired as can be, and have a super-comfy bed, and still take 2 hours to actually slip into sleep. Medication has never helped. Home remedies have never helped. While this is fine on days that sleeping in is okay, I tend to have to get up at around 6:30. Being forced to fall asleep after midnight isn't conducive to this. Help?

Also, go ahead and share your own insomnia stories. I'm sure they're more severe than mine.

[CrimsonAngel]

I slept 6 hours today! :smallbiggrin: I haven't slept that well in a while! :smallcool:

[Ranger Mattos]

Kind of ironic that DeadManSleeping is an insomniac?

For me, I'm a teenager. I have the opposite of insomnia. :smalltongue:

[Haruki-kun]

I'm no longer a teenager, but even as a teenager I had trouble sleeping. My mom says it's because I've always been hyperactive.

Recently, though, I've been having even more trouble sleeping. I guess it's Holiday stress or something like that. Or too much caffeine.

Which also makes me ask: does drinking coffee in the morning messwith your sleep at night?

[DeadManSleeping]

I've quit caffeine, and it hasn't helped my sleep cycle a whif. So, maybe.

[Savannah]

I occasionally have a similar issue to yours, DeadManSleeping*. For me, a large part of it is a recurring mineral deficiency (I hesitate to say exactly which mineral, as I don't want anyone to incorrectly diagnose and treat themselves, but I know exactly which one and can treat it with a multivitamin/mineral supplement). However, I think some of it is also training. If I get into a cycle of not going to sleep easily, I can train myself to have a much worse problem than it originally was. And untraining it isn't easy....

*I always want to read your name as DeadNotSleeping. Is it possible I'm too much of a Joss Whedon fan? :smalltongue:

[Fri]

I'm a manic depressive. Without my meds, my sleep rhytm would usually be awake for two days and then sleep for a day.

[RandomNPC]

I went to the doctor once, told him I cut caffiene from my diet for a few weeks with no changes. I also tried a few weeks of altered diet. Right before seeing the doctor was a week of exercising to exhaustion. It still took two hours a night to get to sleep.

Doctor says: You should try to get more sleep. Ok, we're done, have a nice day."

This, and many other situations like it, are what I tell people when they tell me to call some sort of offical*

Offical: doctor, councilor, police, teacher, coach, almost anyone specificly trained to help really.

[Roukon]

I get insomnia oddly. This first time I noticed it was when I stayed up until 4am reading a book on a school night when I was in high school.

More recently, I will get insomnia where I cannot get to sleep until anywhen from 3 to 5am, even though I have been up since 10am or so the previous day. For a number of weeks some years ago, I had one of the oddest experiences of insomnia. Every Wednesday (or Thursday, I don't remember) I would not be able to sleep until around 6 am, when I had been up since about 10 am the previous day. The next night, I was in bed at a normal time of about midnight and slept about as much as I would normally.

This went on for about two months, and then stopped. Since then, every so often, I will be unable to sleep for whatever reason for one night, and then the next night, it will be like nothing had happened. It happens often enough that I'm not surprised or bothered by it anymore, but not so often that I feel I need to see a physician about it.

Later Days,
Roukon

[Ytaker]

I used to have insomnia. I'd lie in bed for hours, unable to sleep. My mind would race and dance, and keep me awake no matter what I tried. Then I just learned to stay up regularly to 3-5 am. I am no longer an insomniac. :)

[mucco]

In my childhood, I remember having lots of problems falling asleep. These problems seem to have disappeared, fortunately, also thanks to the fact that my sleep pattern has been seriously screwed up for the last 4 years or so. I regularly spend weeks sleeping 4 hours per night, then sleeping 14-16 (or more) all at once, resuming the pattern again, switching "timezones" and such - I've been waking up past noon and going to bed at 5 AM all the last week, for example. It's become a real strategy to cope with exams, since the day I overslept and missed one. From that day, I always try to adjust my sleep pattern so as to wake up 12-14 hours before the exam.

Never had any problem falling asleep since I started doing this. Also, relaxing and finding the right position is crucial. I know I need to lay in three or four different positions before being ready to sleep, but I will only fall asleep when I've done the above, and I'm facing up. It's useful to identify any such routine so you can repeat it if you're having problems. I also try to force myself into a sort of stream of consciousness, because it tends to get me drowsy.

[Bang!]

In my second year of college, I had a lot of trouble sleeping - maybe due to all the coffee and beer that were just a part of the lifestyle, maybe due to class-related stress, I don't know.

After about a year of lying in bed with my eyes open until 3-4 hours before class, I started compressing my schedule in order to run 10k around 9:00 every night and reading for about an hour afterward. I consistently fall asleep around 11:00 nowadays.

There are still some nights that I lie in bed thinking about something or other, but that usually only happens when I'm worked up about a specific issue, rather than something frustratingly unattributable .

[AshDesert]

I have one of the weirdest cases of insomnia that my doctor has ever seen. About every 4-5 months, I get at most 2 hours of sleep a night for about a week. Then, one day, I just crawl into bed at 10, wake up at 7 the next morning, and stay remarkably well-regulated for the next few months (seriously, my internal clock is great when I'm not in my weird state, I don't even use alarm clocks).

I can always tell when the end is coming, because I'm suddenly hit by a massive spark of creativity the night before I go "back on schedule" and stay up the entire night working on something. Most often I end up with a song (or, more often, the music for a song; I suck at lyrics:smallannoyed:), although once I wrote and revised a 50-page short story and then rewrote it in calligraphy. I spent nearly 30 straight hours on that one.

[MoonCat]

I can be exhausted, go to bed at 8:30 (I started doing that due to when my school starts) and not be able to sleep for usually 2 hours. I have stayed awake for 40 hours straight, yet can barely open my eyes at 6:30 when I'm supposed to get up. Once I get up I'm usually at high speed, awake and cognitive. I just have a huge problem falling asleep every night, even when I'm drop-dead exhausted. My biggest sleeping quirk is sleep walking though, I once was on an overnight boat trip and woke up standing in an unnown area of the inside deck! It turns out that in my sleep I had gone up the stairs and walked to the other end of the boat in my sleep before I woke up and had to find my way back again. Now that's a sleeping quirk :smallcool:

[TigerHunter]

I have pretty much what was described in the OP. I'm on my third different medication in as many months. The first one worked for about three days, the second one left me even more depressed than normal, and I have another doctor's appointment because this one has stopped working. Le sigh.

What I really need is a way to turn my brain off when I'm trying to fall asleep.

[Savannah]

What I really need is a way to turn my brain off when I'm trying to fall asleep.

While that's never really been an issue for me, I've heard that some types of meditation can be very useful, as can doing things like consciously tensing and relaxing your muscles one by one (partly for the relaxation and partly to focus your mind on something other than whatever you're thinking about). Like I said, I've not really had that issue so I have no personal experience, but if you haven't tried that sort of thing, you might want to look into it.

[Partof1]

Usually, when I can't sleep, my mind races, it finds topics to ponder, and it chooses engaging, philisophical things.

Does anyone have something they mentally focus on? Nothing too engaging, but nothing that will disinterest my mind so it wanders more.

I swear, my mind has a mind of its own.

[Savannah]

See my post right above yours :smalltongue:

In answer to your question, I'm always imagining something while I'm falling asleep. I started creating a world and characters when I was way younger, and I still end up making up some story with them while I'm going to sleep. (Or thinking about ideas for any of the D&D games I'm working on, although that has a bad tendency to give me weird dreams....)

[Partof1]

Ah, so I pretty much have to focus on something physical? I think I'll try that right now :P

EDIT: To keep my mind on that one topic, that is.

[Amiel]

I tend to suffer from intermittent insomnia. Some days I can sleep like a ton of bricks, on others I won't be able to sleep for days; I've being awake for 48 hour stretches at a time. It's extremely annoying

[grimbold]

i have a similar level to insomnia as you, and i also must wake up early, 7 hours of sleep is a 'good' night for me and 4-5 hours is a bad night. I get 6 on average. It sucks.



I've quit caffeine, and it hasn't helped my sleep cycle a whif. So, maybe.

i tried quitting caffeine for about a month and it did not really help me either

[Don Julio Anejo]

I have no problem falling asleep if I'm tired, but I mess up my sleep cycle so bad it's not even funny. Two entire weeks after finals my normal sleep cycle was go to bed at 6 AM, wake up at 1, get super tired at 1 and take a nap around 11 PM, which reinforced me going to bed even later (by a few days ago it became 8 AM).

Finally decided to *bleep* it and bought melatonin. So far so good :smile:

Let's see how long it lasts.

PS: quitting caffeine won't have any effect unless you drink it in the later part of the day (say, after 5 if you go to bed at 10). Its effect only lasts several hours, at the end of which you're usually more tired.

[ScottishDragon]

Usually, when I can't sleep, my mind races, it finds topics to ponder, and it chooses engaging, philisophical things.

Does anyone have something they mentally focus on? Nothing too engaging, but nothing that will disinterest my mind so it wanders more.

I swear, my mind has a mind of its own.

This is me. I hate this. Usually it picks a converation that I either had recently or up to 2 years ago that is very vivid. Or it makes up it's own, which is more annoying. I don't want to have to take medication,and I do not drink caffeine. How do I tell my brain to SHUT UP and let me sleep? I've exersized for 5 hrs straight before bed and not gone to sleep untill 3 hrs later. no matter what level of exhausted I am I can't sleep at night.

[Yardo]

I usualy don't have much problems falling asleep, except when I have to get up early the next day. I work in shifts, so that does not help much either.
Reading a few pages of a nice book is what I usualy do before I go to sleep, helps me relax. A nice glass of warm milk also seems to work, I hear.

[Trog]

Had a bout of this last night, actually. I got roughly 4 hours of non-continuous sleep. I'm a bit zombie-like today. x.X

[Demonweave]

As this seems to have become a place in part to vent about insomnia I will follow the trend.

I have the same issue as most of you it seems. My mind races thinking of a million things at once, usually over analysing everything. Means I can literally go weeks without any sleep at all, then I will have a week of just sleeping 12-18 hours a day. Have tried exercises, medication, distractions and the like. Nothing works.

The positive side of it is that I get alot more reading done. (sadly I cant remember any of it minutes after)

[Barbin]

Hello all! I'm posting because I can't sleep.

[MoonCat]

I'm finally getting back on schedule, hooray!