Sleeplessness, a 3am inventory
It's 3.09am. I cannot sleep. Naturally, tomorrow is a day upon which I have something scheduled to do every minute from 7.55am to 11pm. I remember being told once that people who can't sleep at night aren't really insomniacs; they just say they are because it sounds glamorous.
As it's 3.09am and I am awake for no reason at all, I think I shall discuss exactly how glamorous chronic sleep disorder really is. For one thing, it never goes away. Some people have it come on later in life, but in my case, I was a newborn who didn't sleep through the night and then a baby who didn't, a child who couldn't quite manage it, and now I am twenty-two years and ten months old and I cannot sleep at night. It ruins everything. It makes you paranoid about hours, about times, it makes you fail any class before eleven in the morning (and don't you dare laugh at that and say something faux-amusant about students), it makes you constantly think about something that everyone else takes for granted.
I'm trying to stop calling it insomnia, though, because it really isn't. Sometimes, I can't get to sleep until it's light; sometimes, I fall asleep like a light going out and jerk bolt awake again at two in the morning; sometimes I fall asleep at ten and wake up fourteen hours later; sometimes I don't see daylight for a week at a time; sometimes I see sunrise every day. A rampant smorgasbord of disorder, but the one thing I cannot do is fall asleep at midnight, stay asleep for eight hours and wake up refreshed. This is it, this is the holy grail I've been aiming at all these years.
Things that don't help:
-Warm milk. (I have given up trying to be polite to people who suggest this.)
-Hot baths. (They do, a little, but you can't do this every day and besides right now I don't have a bathtub.)
-Breathing exercises, meditation and whatnot. These don't lack value; they stop me lying in bed and having anxious three-am thoughts. But they don't get me to sleep. Cognitive behaviourial stuff in general is not bad - but it hasn't fixed this problem.
-"Getting up early so you'll be tired". Once again, spoken by people who don't have disordered sleep. Do you know what happens when I try and do this? I force my unwilling, exhausted body out of bed, I get through my nine-to-five day, I desperately stay awake until some reasonable hour for bed, at which point I don't sleep. And the next day I usually wish I were dead. So. No.
(Actually, the best advice I have ever had is from my father who has the same issues with slightly less severity. It goes like this. Are you sleepy? Are you actually going to lose your job/fail your degree if you go to bed now? Then go, and at least you'll have slept.)
-Diazepam and its relations. Well, of course they do work - I can take pills and be out like, again, the proverbial light. The thing is, the pills wear off, I wake up twelve hours later, then the next night, if I don't take them, it's the same old story.
-10mg amitriptyline. This puts me to sleep nicely, but then I wake up at lunchtime with a splitting-skull hangover. The one time I tried to get up at eight and go to school the night after I'd taken it, I nearly fell into traffic. I had to go home after my first class and spend the rest of the day sleeping it off. Sub-optimal.
-5mg amitripyline. Less experience of this, but what it seems to be so far is I take it, I fall asleep when it's getting light and then wake up at lunchtime with the splitting-skull hangover.
Things that do work:
-Sleeping at other times. I sleep nicely in the early light, in the mid-afternoon - any time when it doesn't matter if I sleep or don't sleep, where either is acceptable. In fact, the most comfortable time of day is six in the morning - still cool and quiet, but somehow my brain lets me out without the need to force the door.
-Sleeping in other places. I have slept comfortably on trains, aeroplanes, bare floors, beaches. As an undergraduate I had a room with a windowseat and that was such a blessing - I occasionally used to sleep in it instead of my bed, and it was very useful.
-Sleeping with another person. This isn't infallible by any means, but as an average taken over months and years, I sleep better if there's someone there. Shim usually sleeps through my night-time wanderings, which is a blessing.
-Citalopram. When I was taking it for depression, it worked quite well at making me sleep regularly and deeply, but the reason I came off it in the end was because it was tending to extremes - thirteen or fourteen hours' sleep every day. Plus the side-effects it was having, which weren't nice.
-Exhaustion. I'm not one of those people who will never sleep - after four or five days, it'll happen.
Caffiene:
-gets its own category because it fits into neither of the above categories. I have lost count of people telling me to cut down on caffiene, or asking me in incredulous tones, "But if you're an insomniac, why do you drink so much coffee?"
Because I'm an insomniac, you fucking idiot. How the hell would I get anything done? Filtered coffee is what keeps me approaching humanity when the problem is very bad - it's the reason I can be up and about nearly every day, even at a nadir point.
(And yes, I have tried the giving-it-up experiment. I'm not physically addicted, but I missed it. A lot. And slept no better, though I gave it the fair three weeks. So.)
Right now, I'm kind of at the end of my options. Amitriptyline was my GP's Great White Hope - now it hasn't worked, I'm not sure what he'll be able to suggest, if anything. He seems to think that any kind of referral would be futile. I don't know if I agree, but I don't want to push it. So, in conclusion. Pretty glamorous, huh? Bet you all wish you were me.
It is now 3.40am. I have a few more hours' lying awake to do.
As it's 3.09am and I am awake for no reason at all, I think I shall discuss exactly how glamorous chronic sleep disorder really is. For one thing, it never goes away. Some people have it come on later in life, but in my case, I was a newborn who didn't sleep through the night and then a baby who didn't, a child who couldn't quite manage it, and now I am twenty-two years and ten months old and I cannot sleep at night. It ruins everything. It makes you paranoid about hours, about times, it makes you fail any class before eleven in the morning (and don't you dare laugh at that and say something faux-amusant about students), it makes you constantly think about something that everyone else takes for granted.
I'm trying to stop calling it insomnia, though, because it really isn't. Sometimes, I can't get to sleep until it's light; sometimes, I fall asleep like a light going out and jerk bolt awake again at two in the morning; sometimes I fall asleep at ten and wake up fourteen hours later; sometimes I don't see daylight for a week at a time; sometimes I see sunrise every day. A rampant smorgasbord of disorder, but the one thing I cannot do is fall asleep at midnight, stay asleep for eight hours and wake up refreshed. This is it, this is the holy grail I've been aiming at all these years.
Things that don't help:
-Warm milk. (I have given up trying to be polite to people who suggest this.)
-Hot baths. (They do, a little, but you can't do this every day and besides right now I don't have a bathtub.)
-Breathing exercises, meditation and whatnot. These don't lack value; they stop me lying in bed and having anxious three-am thoughts. But they don't get me to sleep. Cognitive behaviourial stuff in general is not bad - but it hasn't fixed this problem.
-"Getting up early so you'll be tired". Once again, spoken by people who don't have disordered sleep. Do you know what happens when I try and do this? I force my unwilling, exhausted body out of bed, I get through my nine-to-five day, I desperately stay awake until some reasonable hour for bed, at which point I don't sleep. And the next day I usually wish I were dead. So. No.
(Actually, the best advice I have ever had is from my father who has the same issues with slightly less severity. It goes like this. Are you sleepy? Are you actually going to lose your job/fail your degree if you go to bed now? Then go, and at least you'll have slept.)
-Diazepam and its relations. Well, of course they do work - I can take pills and be out like, again, the proverbial light. The thing is, the pills wear off, I wake up twelve hours later, then the next night, if I don't take them, it's the same old story.
-10mg amitriptyline. This puts me to sleep nicely, but then I wake up at lunchtime with a splitting-skull hangover. The one time I tried to get up at eight and go to school the night after I'd taken it, I nearly fell into traffic. I had to go home after my first class and spend the rest of the day sleeping it off. Sub-optimal.
-5mg amitripyline. Less experience of this, but what it seems to be so far is I take it, I fall asleep when it's getting light and then wake up at lunchtime with the splitting-skull hangover.
Things that do work:
-Sleeping at other times. I sleep nicely in the early light, in the mid-afternoon - any time when it doesn't matter if I sleep or don't sleep, where either is acceptable. In fact, the most comfortable time of day is six in the morning - still cool and quiet, but somehow my brain lets me out without the need to force the door.
-Sleeping in other places. I have slept comfortably on trains, aeroplanes, bare floors, beaches. As an undergraduate I had a room with a windowseat and that was such a blessing - I occasionally used to sleep in it instead of my bed, and it was very useful.
-Sleeping with another person. This isn't infallible by any means, but as an average taken over months and years, I sleep better if there's someone there. Shim usually sleeps through my night-time wanderings, which is a blessing.
-Citalopram. When I was taking it for depression, it worked quite well at making me sleep regularly and deeply, but the reason I came off it in the end was because it was tending to extremes - thirteen or fourteen hours' sleep every day. Plus the side-effects it was having, which weren't nice.
-Exhaustion. I'm not one of those people who will never sleep - after four or five days, it'll happen.
Caffiene:
-gets its own category because it fits into neither of the above categories. I have lost count of people telling me to cut down on caffiene, or asking me in incredulous tones, "But if you're an insomniac, why do you drink so much coffee?"
Because I'm an insomniac, you fucking idiot. How the hell would I get anything done? Filtered coffee is what keeps me approaching humanity when the problem is very bad - it's the reason I can be up and about nearly every day, even at a nadir point.
(And yes, I have tried the giving-it-up experiment. I'm not physically addicted, but I missed it. A lot. And slept no better, though I gave it the fair three weeks. So.)
Right now, I'm kind of at the end of my options. Amitriptyline was my GP's Great White Hope - now it hasn't worked, I'm not sure what he'll be able to suggest, if anything. He seems to think that any kind of referral would be futile. I don't know if I agree, but I don't want to push it. So, in conclusion. Pretty glamorous, huh? Bet you all wish you were me.
It is now 3.40am. I have a few more hours' lying awake to do.