Insomnia

Frenzied Wombat · Dec 31, 2012

A thread to deal with the maddening issue of Insomnia. How it slowly tears apart your life, your experiences in dealing with it, your efforts to treat it, etc..

Myself, I have what's called "sleep maintenance" or "middle of the night awakening" insomnia. I have no problem falling asleep, but like clockwork I am up at 3:00AM +/- 1 minute (no joke on accuracy) and most of the time cannot fall back asleep, tossing and turning in anguish watching the minutes count down on my alarm clock. Most nights I get 4-5 hours of sleep and after awhile you just begin to feel like you're falling apart, barely able to make it through the day. Your memory, your skin, your energy-- even your ability to form coherent sentences begin to suffer.

I tried Ambien at first and that didn't work as it only helps put you to sleep, not stay asleep. Same with Lunesta. Alcohol actually made it worse, as the 4 hours sleep I'd get were actually worse quality than before. Trazadone worked like a dream for about six months-- I practically cried the first night I took it and for the first time in ages slept a clean nine hours. Now it's stopped working...

Would love to hear other people's methods in dealing with this nightmare..

cosmic_cs_sl · Dec 31, 2012

Try meditation, for 10 minutes, 10 minutes before you lay in bed. I wouldn't do it while laying in bed though.

Also, try jogging, 10 minutes, about 5 hours before you go to bed.

Not sure how noisy your area gets (intermittent cars / motorcycles, etc.?), but you can also try earplugs. It takes a week or two to get used to them though.

Zombie Thorne_sl · Dec 31, 2012

I have the same problem. My solution is sleep 5 hours a night on weekdays (midnight to 5am) then maybe 6-7 hours on weekends once I'm worn out enough. Yeah it sucks...

cosmic_cs_sl · Dec 31, 2012

If the time is so accurate, why don't you try to sleep earlier, or does work get in the way?

Also, what is your mental state when you wake up? Are your thoughts running amok or do you have nothing on your mind, just alertness?

Do you have any other psychological issues? Trazodone is not mainly a hypnotic like Ambien. It also has like antidepressant and anti-anxiety effects.

It'd help if you describe how long this has been happening, whether you're married, single, have girlfriend, etc. Do you think it is at all psychological, or is it something else?

Kid Sized Coffin_sl · Dec 31, 2012

I've used a visualization technique since I was a kid to wake myself at a specific time. It's always worked as long as I haven't been awake for a really long time or used drugs. Not sure if I'm weird this way or anybody can do it.

I imagine myself drawing the time I want to wake up on skipping rock with chalk colored based on whim. I take note of my surroundings and look at all the little details like a grassy hill behind me and the sidewalk I'm standing on, the shoes I'm wearing, always next to a body of water. Then I skip the rock across the surface of the water, examining its action from multiple angles. I notice the way the water ripples and how the rock sinks to the bottom, focusing on the inscribed time through all of this, and it falls until it rests on the bottom of the lake or the sluice or whatever.

After that I imagine the digital clock from Groundhog Day flipping to the appropriate time and study that for a bit.

I know it sounds goofy but I can wake up at any minute I want. I've never tried seconds. My dad one day just kind of made a remark in passing to me one day about training your body to do weird shit like control blood pressure and all this other crap just using your imagination. Decided to try it and the shit worked on the first attempt. Kinda freaked me out. Basically 100% accuracy.

I do have problems getting to sleep though. I deal with it by just staying awake till I'm exhausted.

supertouch_sl · Dec 31, 2012

what's your diet like?

i had transient insomnia a few months ago and melatonin worked wonders.

Merkins4Brazil_sl · Dec 31, 2012

I wake up and cannot fall back asleep a couple times a month, my solution is to chug a beer, put on a podcast I have heard before, History lectures work well, puts me out in 30-45 mins.

Frenzied Wombat · Dec 31, 2012

Going to bed earlier just wakes me up earlier. I meant to say going to bed at my usual time 11:00 PM waked me at 3am on the dot. if I go to bed earlier I generally wake earlier. When i do wake, I'm generally alert and not tired--almost energized in fact. Not really much on my mind per se.

I used to sleep like a baby most of my life, then a few years back I had a horrible break-up with a long time girlfriend while simultaneously dealing with a very sick mother, both of which lead to a bout of depression and anxiety. That is when the insomnia first kicked in... However, even when these problems became a thing of the past and I felt a lot better, the insomnia persisted. It's like the whole series of events "broke" something in my brain. Initially tried meditation, seeing a shrink, diet change, ambien, etc.. Nothing worked until I tried Trazadone.

Currently have a good steady girlfriend, good job-- not much to complain about.

I've never had a sleep study done, which at this point will probably be my next step

cosmic_cs_sl said:
If the time is so accurate, why don't you try to sleep earlier, or does work get in the way?

Also, what is your mental state when you wake up? Are your thoughts running amok or do you have nothing on your mind, just alertness?

Do you have any other psychological issues? Trazodone is not mainly a hypnotic like Ambien. It also has like antidepressant and anti-anxiety effects.

It'd help if you describe how long this has been happening, whether you're married, single, have girlfriend, etc. Do you think it is at all psychological, or is it something else?

Tarrant · Jan 1, 2013

I watch Prometheus when I can't sleep and within 20 minutes I'm out cold.

This is not a joke.

Azrayne · Jan 1, 2013

Been trying to figure out a way to defeat insomnia for my entire life, with no luck. It's been really bad every since I was a young child, instead of a typical 16/8 awake/sleep schedule, I tend to stay awake for 18 - 20 hours then sleep for 6 - 10, no matter what I'm actually doing during that time. I sometimes think it's something deeply ingrained in my psyche, being the reading/gaming geek that I am I would struggle to stay up as long as possible as a child so I could fit more in, especially during the school term when going to sleep just meant waking up to go to school, and I think that pattern just got dug into my brain so deeply that I can't break the programming. Tried meds, meditation, every possible sleep plan or cycle or rhythm, no luck, and it baffles my doctor.

These days I just deal with it, forcing myself to get up if I need to do something when I'd otherwise be sleeping, and occasionally pop a sleeping pill. Luckily I don't need benzos too often, a shop here sells these amazing "herbal" pills. No idea what's in them, but one capsule will have me out cold within an hour, without the hangover nitrazepam or temazepam give.

Arakkis · Jan 1, 2013

My lady has had insomnia her whole life, and the three things that have really helped are daily exercise, no caffeine after noon, and sparing use of melatonin. Melatonin is what your body naturally produces in order to cause you to get sleepy and can be bought in supplement form in any store that sells vitamins. She sometimes goes through short fits where she becomes resistant to the melatonin because she starts using it too much, but a few days without it and she is back to sleeping all night. She sometimes supplements with harder sleep aids during those times, but all of them have left her feeling like a zombie all day (which defeats the purpose of taking them in the first place) or have other crazy side effects. For example, Ambien puts her out no matter how solidly she is awake, but a side effect of it is sleepwalking and amnesia. We only had a few conversations she didn't remember, but people have reported cooking entire meals or getting in their car and driving somewhere and not remembering doing any of it.

Hope this post helps because I have seen just how terrible real insomnia is.

ToeMissile · Jan 1, 2013

Only read the OP, and skimmed the rest, but was reminded of something I heard on an ep ofRadioLabbut couldn't find the ep. It is mentioned in the TED talk though:

when people are living without any sort of artificial light at all, they sleep twice every night. They go to bed around 8:00 p.m. until midnight and then again, they sleep from about 2:00 a.m. until sunrise. And in-between, they have a couple of hours of sort of meditative quiet in bed. And during this time, there's a surge of prolactin, the likes of which a modern day never sees. The people in these studies report feeling so awake during the daytime, that they realize they're experiencing true wakefulness for the first time in their lives.

Video here, full text below.

Let's start with day and night. Life evolved under conditions of light and darkness, light and then darkness. And so plants and animals developed their own internal clocks so that they would be ready for these changes in light. These are chemical clocks, and they're found in every known being that has two or more cells and in some that only have one cell.

I'll give you an example -- if you take a horseshoe crab off the beach, and you fly it all the way across the continent, and you drop it into a sloped cage, it will scramble up the floor of the cage as the tide is rising on its home shores, and it'll skitter down again right as the water is receding thousands of miles away. It'll do this for weeks, until it kind of gradually loses the plot. And it's incredible to watch, but there's nothing psychic or paranormal going on; it's simply that these crabs have internal cycles that correspond, usually, with what's going on around it.

So, we have this ability as well. And in humans, we call it the "body clock." You can see this most clearly when you take away someone's watch and you shut them into a bunker, deep underground, for a couple of months. (Laughter) People actually volunteer for this, and they usually come out kind of raving about their productive time in the hole. So, no matter how atypical these subjects would have to be, they all show the same thing. They get up just a little bit later every day -- say 15 minutes or so -- and they kind of drift all the way around the clock like this over the course of the weeks. And so, in this way we know that they are working on their own internal clocks, rather than somehow sensing the day outside.

So fine, we have a body clock, and it turns out that it's incredibly important in our lives. It's a huge driver for culture and I think that it's the most underrated force on our behavior. We evolved as a species near the equator, and so we're very well-equipped to deal with 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness. But of course, we've spread to every corner of the globe and in Arctic Canada, where I live, we have perpetual daylight in summer and 24 hours of darkness in winter. So the culture, the northern aboriginal culture, traditionally has been highly seasonal. In winter, there's a lot of sleeping going on; you enjoy your family life inside. And in summer, it's almost manic hunting and working activity very long hours, very active.

So, what would our natural rhythm look like? What would our sleeping patterns be in the sort of ideal sense? Well, it turns out that when people are living without any sort of artificial light at all, they sleep twice every night. They go to bed around 8:00 p.m. until midnight and then again, they sleep from about 2:00 a.m. until sunrise. And in-between, they have a couple of hours of sort of meditative quiet in bed. And during this time, there's a surge of prolactin, the likes of which a modern day never sees. The people in these studies report feeling so awake during the daytime, that they realize they're experiencing true wakefulness for the first time in their lives.

So, cut to the modern day. We're living in a culture of jet lag, global travel, 24-hour business, shift work. And you know, our modern ways of doing things have their advantages, but I believe we should understand the costs.

Blide_sl · Jan 3, 2013

Frenzied Wombat_sl said:
I have no problem falling asleep, but like clockwork I am up at 3:00AM +/- 1 minute (no joke on accuracy)

I was doing this for a while and then it finally dawned on me that the subtle email notification sound on my phone was causing me to wake up.

As for insomnia. One thing I do is not look at my clock. I just don't want to know what time it is. Knowing it just makes it harder to go back to sleep sometimes. I will admit this has screwed me up a couple times when my alarm didn't go off.

I fortunately don't experience insomnia much. I find when I'm stressed in general, I'm just drowsy and sleep a lot. Though occasionally anxiety or excitement will keep me up. I found for those bouts of insomnia, anti-anxiety medicine puts me to sleep more effectively than a sleep aid.

Szlia · Jan 3, 2013

If you don't have trouble falling asleep, couldn't your problem be fixed by a nap or two during the day?

BrutulTM · Jan 3, 2013

Merkins4Brazil_sl said:
I wake up and cannot fall back asleep a couple times a month, my solution is to chug a beer, put on a podcast I have heard before, History lectures work well, puts me out in 30-45 mins.

I sort of do the same thing, but with the TV. I also sleep with a fan for white noise, but if I put the TV on a show that I don't care about (usually a rerun of Family Guy or something on Cartoon Network) with a 30 minute sleep timer and then close my eyes and listen to it I am usually out in 5 minutes. The main thing is to keep your head from getting going so you lay there and worry about every problem in your life, all of which seem about 1000x worse than they actually are at 3 in the morning.

Calbiyum · Jan 3, 2013

I'm actually dealing with this now as it is 10:47am and I still can't fall asleep.

I love the people who have the solution "just go to sleep".

Frenzied Wombat · Jan 3, 2013

Ha, I wish my job allowed for that. To be honest though I can't stand naps-- waking up once per day is traumatizing enough (I'm the epitome of "bad morning person") so I can't imagine actually waking up twice. Plus, when I have taken a nap before I wake up all groggy, confused, and fucked up that it's still daylight outside.

From what I can read, the waking up after a certain number of hours syndrome is something that becomes self-reinforcing, similar to how a normal sleeper automatically wakes up right before their alarm clock goes off for work. Your brain becomes "trained" to wake you up at that time. So, the suggestion is to try and break that cycle by staying up for 24 hours straight. Not fun, but it's worth a shot.

Szlia_sl said:
If you don't have trouble falling asleep, couldn't your problem be fixed by a nap or two during the day?

shattuck_sl · Jan 3, 2013

Dealt with this a lot over the last few years, best advice I've seen in this thread so far are to avoid any form of light and don't look at the clock. It always starts for me by looking at the clock and starting to worry that I won't get enough sleep by the time I need to wake up, or I'll sleep through when I'm supposed to wake up and be late.

Melatonin did nothing for me, but my problem has always been falling asleep in the first place. Last night I got in bed at 1am and didn't fall asleep until about 6am. This was the first night in about 3 weeks I've had trouble sleeping. From about late November through mid-December I was freaking out about finals/projects due in school, once that all ended I was at ease and fell asleep pretty easily. The biggest factor I've found that helps me sleep is when I just don't give a fuck about what I have going on the next day. Sounds weird, but it puts me at ease and I fall asleep easily.

Gauss_sl · Jan 3, 2013

I don't have insomnia, but if I have something big the next day, I tend not to be able to sleep. My strategy is kind of weird, but I just imagine that I'm listening to what I can best describe as talk radio, and I let my mind wander about that the speaker is actually saying. The sentences are complete word salad because I'm just trying to make sure the talking never stops, but I never fail to fall asleep within 5 minutes once I have committed to this.

Cutlery · Jan 3, 2013

I started working overnights the year after I got out of high school, and I also moved out on my 18th birthday, with my entire senior year left. So basically I was apartment dwelling for 11ish years there, and during that entire time I suffered from pretty much daily insomnia. It's how I met my wife, in fact...being up all day with nothing to do, and going to work at night tends to leave you with a lot of free time for doing shit. I was using Simply Sleep for probably 8 of those years just to get some semblance of normalcy, but without fail, if I forgot to take it, i'd be up in a couple hours and wide awake.

The fucked up thing is that after all that, when I bought my house, I put the Simply Sleep in the closet, and haven't touched it since. Slept fine through the night here from day 1. I'm sure there's different causes for insomnia, be they chemical or mental, but for me, it certainly appeared to be 100% mental. There's absolutely justifiable reason to be suffering from it for 11 years of apartment life, and then just have it shut off the first day I sleep in my own home, and stay off for 3 years now.

Now, mind you, I still don't sleep 8 hours a night. 7 is an absolute great night sleep, but I don't feel constantly fucked over by only sleeping 2 hours anymore.

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