The White Lily (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thewhitelily) wrote2007-10-08 08:16 pm
thewhitelily) wrote2007-10-08 08:16 pm
Entry tags:
Insomnia... or is it?
Contributing to my lack of post about my awesome holiday and my rather random rambly post this morning is having been absolutely wrecked from insomnia for the past week.
Unfortunately, at the moment, insomnia isn't simply increasing my number of hours in a day, as it does when it's mild. Instead, it's making me completely incapable of any kind of productivity. I lurch through the day with my arms extended in front of me, feeling like I could drop dead from exhaustion at any moment, but still unable to sleep at any time when normal human beings are in bed. I get splitting headaches and sometimes visual artifacts from sleep deprivation, I have the attention span of a goldfish with a head injury, even when I do sleep I don't dream, and without my fodder for creativity I end up staring at a blank page wishing I could think what happened next... or at all.
This weekend, I was too far gone to even catch up on sleep on the Friday night, and on the Saturday night I drank myself nearly comotose trying to knock myself out (which succeeded, but I just ended up waking up at 1:30am instead and watching the sun rise). After a full week of feeling like this, I did some googling and found something very interesting. My symptoms don't fit the definition of insomnia. Instead, they fit the definition of a specific sleep disorder: delayed sleep phase syndrome.
Basically, my body clock's on a different cycle to the rest of the world, and I can't go to sleep early any more than a jetlag sufferer can sleep at what their body tells them is midday.
The particular symptoms that made me dance up and down in recognition were:
1) generally falling asleep at a similar time, no matter how tired or what time I go to bed
2) sleeping very short nights during the week and then catching up on the weekend (I thought I was the only person in the world who did this!) (Edit: obviously I understand that people often stay up later than they should on week nights and like to sleep in on weekends - I'm talking about extent, as well as it being a system that generally works without causing me trouble during the week)
3) lying in bed unable to get to sleep for literally hours
4) no trouble with staying asleep once I've got there
5) sleeping well and regularly when I can follow my own schedule
6) almost absurd ability to sleep in the morning - on my worst nights, I wait until dawn to go to bed, because I'll be able to sleep once the sun's coming up
7) tendency to procrastinate going to bed, especially when overtired, because I know it'll be useless
8) inability to simply force my body to sleep at the right times by enforcing a regular schedule
DSPS is very common in adolescents, and I certainly had it then - and normally, for me, it doesn't even cause a problem. I sleep when I'm tired, and when I'm not... bonus! Unfortunately, right at the moment, it's stopped being something that gives me my most productive hours in the quiet of midnight, and started making me completely useless. Instead of being able to happily work on through the night every weeknight and reach Friday with a twenty hour sleep debt but a whole heck of a lot of work done, and letting me enjoy a wonderful long sleep in on the weekend, it's sucking all the joy.
Fortunately... it is treatable!
There's a few treatments, mostly stuff I've heard before in various forms, but the one that caught my eye was bright light in the morning, to reset my body clock at the beginning of each day and help pull my body into a proper routine and stop it drifting again. This makes a lot of sense why it's been getting so bad: because it's so hard to get up in the morning, I end up dragging myself out of bed fifteen minutes before work starts, taking my water-restriction four-minute-limited shower, stumbling into the car with my eyes mostly shut so the light doesn't burn them in the three minute trip to work, and creeping into the office where I sit bathed in the light of my LCD communicating mainly in grunts and snarls until around 2 o'clock, when I start thinking about lunch. That's also usually about when I realise that my clothes don't match.
Not a whole lot of sunlight in the morning there. :P
So, from this morning, I've started a new trial of getting up an hour earlier in the morning (ie. at the same time as Hubby) and resurrecting my vegie garden, even though will I need to water it with a bucket of water collected from the bottom of the shower. This has the dual benefits of being in the sun and a physical exertion, which will hopefully reinforce themselves in my brain chemistry as: time to get up!
I'm also:
1) entirely cutting out caffiene and alcohol, at least for a little while until I stabalise
2) instituting a bedtime routine that involves a (quick!) shower, hot milk, half an hour with an actual paper book, and a couple of other classics that have never really worked for me on their own
3) insisting that we have lunch at a roughly similar time every day, rather than waiting for a break in Hubby's frantic coding, which could take place any time from 1pm to 4:30
4) no late night TV, not even if I can't sleep
Today I'm still wasted, but I have hope.
If all this doesn't work and getting up at the crack 'o dawn (ie. 7:40am!) is still cruel and unusual torture with no benefits by the time I get to November, I'll just let the garden shrivel and die again, because watering with a bucket if there's no particular reason is... almost as cruel as getting up early.
If it does work, however, hopefully I'll feel like a person again soon. Maybe I'll even keep it up. Or maybe once my body's got itself sorted out again, I can go back to enjoying my lovely productive midnights instead of cursing them.
Hurrah for a plan, and hurrah for the hope of some sunlight at the end of this last horrible, horrible week!
Unfortunately, at the moment, insomnia isn't simply increasing my number of hours in a day, as it does when it's mild. Instead, it's making me completely incapable of any kind of productivity. I lurch through the day with my arms extended in front of me, feeling like I could drop dead from exhaustion at any moment, but still unable to sleep at any time when normal human beings are in bed. I get splitting headaches and sometimes visual artifacts from sleep deprivation, I have the attention span of a goldfish with a head injury, even when I do sleep I don't dream, and without my fodder for creativity I end up staring at a blank page wishing I could think what happened next... or at all.
This weekend, I was too far gone to even catch up on sleep on the Friday night, and on the Saturday night I drank myself nearly comotose trying to knock myself out (which succeeded, but I just ended up waking up at 1:30am instead and watching the sun rise). After a full week of feeling like this, I did some googling and found something very interesting. My symptoms don't fit the definition of insomnia. Instead, they fit the definition of a specific sleep disorder: delayed sleep phase syndrome.
Basically, my body clock's on a different cycle to the rest of the world, and I can't go to sleep early any more than a jetlag sufferer can sleep at what their body tells them is midday.
The particular symptoms that made me dance up and down in recognition were:
1) generally falling asleep at a similar time, no matter how tired or what time I go to bed
2) sleeping very short nights during the week and then catching up on the weekend (I thought I was the only person in the world who did this!) (Edit: obviously I understand that people often stay up later than they should on week nights and like to sleep in on weekends - I'm talking about extent, as well as it being a system that generally works without causing me trouble during the week)
3) lying in bed unable to get to sleep for literally hours
4) no trouble with staying asleep once I've got there
5) sleeping well and regularly when I can follow my own schedule
6) almost absurd ability to sleep in the morning - on my worst nights, I wait until dawn to go to bed, because I'll be able to sleep once the sun's coming up
7) tendency to procrastinate going to bed, especially when overtired, because I know it'll be useless
8) inability to simply force my body to sleep at the right times by enforcing a regular schedule
DSPS is very common in adolescents, and I certainly had it then - and normally, for me, it doesn't even cause a problem. I sleep when I'm tired, and when I'm not... bonus! Unfortunately, right at the moment, it's stopped being something that gives me my most productive hours in the quiet of midnight, and started making me completely useless. Instead of being able to happily work on through the night every weeknight and reach Friday with a twenty hour sleep debt but a whole heck of a lot of work done, and letting me enjoy a wonderful long sleep in on the weekend, it's sucking all the joy.
Fortunately... it is treatable!
There's a few treatments, mostly stuff I've heard before in various forms, but the one that caught my eye was bright light in the morning, to reset my body clock at the beginning of each day and help pull my body into a proper routine and stop it drifting again. This makes a lot of sense why it's been getting so bad: because it's so hard to get up in the morning, I end up dragging myself out of bed fifteen minutes before work starts, taking my water-restriction four-minute-limited shower, stumbling into the car with my eyes mostly shut so the light doesn't burn them in the three minute trip to work, and creeping into the office where I sit bathed in the light of my LCD communicating mainly in grunts and snarls until around 2 o'clock, when I start thinking about lunch. That's also usually about when I realise that my clothes don't match.
Not a whole lot of sunlight in the morning there. :P
So, from this morning, I've started a new trial of getting up an hour earlier in the morning (ie. at the same time as Hubby) and resurrecting my vegie garden, even though will I need to water it with a bucket of water collected from the bottom of the shower. This has the dual benefits of being in the sun and a physical exertion, which will hopefully reinforce themselves in my brain chemistry as: time to get up!
I'm also:
1) entirely cutting out caffiene and alcohol, at least for a little while until I stabalise
2) instituting a bedtime routine that involves a (quick!) shower, hot milk, half an hour with an actual paper book, and a couple of other classics that have never really worked for me on their own
3) insisting that we have lunch at a roughly similar time every day, rather than waiting for a break in Hubby's frantic coding, which could take place any time from 1pm to 4:30
4) no late night TV, not even if I can't sleep
Today I'm still wasted, but I have hope.
If all this doesn't work and getting up at the crack 'o dawn (ie. 7:40am!) is still cruel and unusual torture with no benefits by the time I get to November, I'll just let the garden shrivel and die again, because watering with a bucket if there's no particular reason is... almost as cruel as getting up early.
If it does work, however, hopefully I'll feel like a person again soon. Maybe I'll even keep it up. Or maybe once my body's got itself sorted out again, I can go back to enjoying my lovely productive midnights instead of cursing them.
Hurrah for a plan, and hurrah for the hope of some sunlight at the end of this last horrible, horrible week!
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In a way, I do have it, but in another way, I don't. I'd love to go to bed at 2AM and wake up at noon or something, but school requires me to wake up much earlier. But I manage to wake up on time, so it isn't a problem.
2) sleeping very short nights during the week and then catching up on the weekend (I thought I was the only person in the world who did this!)
I do this all the time, except that it isn't as exaggerated. :P I sleep 6-7 hours during the week (which isn't really bad, but it's still less than the recommended nine hours of sleep a day for teenagers), and at least nine hours on the weekend. I'd probably end up sleeping for twelve, if not for people waking me up. :P
...bright light in the morning, to reset my body clock at the beginning of each day and help pull my body into a proper routine and stop it drifting again.
One of the reasons why school starts too early. :P In the autumn now, I get up before the sun rises. On music rehearsal mornings, we start before the sun rises. And DST in the spring throws me off completely. Day before DST I wake up after the sun rises. Set the clock an hour ahead. Next morning my alarm goes off in the dark.
entirely cutting out caffiene...
:P I'm one of the (possibly few) people who doesn't rely on caffeine in the morning. Sure, I'm miserable in the morning, but at least I can get up by myself. (Well, with the help of an alarm clock.)
...getting up at the crack 'o dawn (ie. 7:40am!)
I have to get up at 7AM to make it to school, and I live fairly close to the school. And I get a ride. The poor people who live on the other end of the city and have to take public transit? Even more distance to travel... with transit that sucks and is slow.
And don't get me started on music rehearsal. At 7AM, the teacher starts conducting. At 7AM, we're all tuned up and warmed up and going.Hurrah for a plan, and hurrah for the hope of some sunlight at the end of this last horrible, horrible week!
Yay! Good luck with your plan!
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And darn those people who keep insisting on waking perfectly happy people like us up in the morning! It's just not fair! (Unfortunately, my sleep cycle keeps shifting - during honours, when I didn't have any reason to be up or down at certain times, I'd go right through the other side of the night happily.
Getting up before sunrise is inhuman! It's just not right! *has much sympathy for you there*
Caffiene... yeah, I don't drink it because I want to wake up, I drink it because I like the taste of Coke. Maybe there's a bit of positive reinforcement going on there with my body going "oooh, caffiene hit!" but I've usually been up for at least a couple of hours before I have any.
*grin* 7:40am was a joke - I get up later than any other person with a full time job I know. :) Enjoy your late mornings while you can!
Anyway, need to get to bed. :) Thanks for the good luck and the comment!
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Same as you and Gussiki, I get much less sleep on weekdays, then sleep 11-12 hours on weekends. This means that Friday is my most tired day, and it's also when NOSB practice is. Which makes me even less likely to get questions in practice than usual.
Urgh, the sun doesn't rise until halfway through the bus route, generally. I wake up at 5:50 - or 5:30 if I need to shower - on weekdays. (I'm the first stop, and the bus route is freaking long.)
And I don't drink caffeine in the morning either. *high fives Gus* I don't like the taste of coffee, and tea takes too much effort and time to make. =P I don't think caffeine does much for me, anyway. I've tried drinking tea to keep myself awake for paper writing purposes once or twice, but I think it was more of a placebo thing.
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How annoying to have tired!day line up with attention!needed!day! And oh, wow! Getting up while it's still dark?! You're really dedicated.
Ah, see caffiene only works for me when it's cold, ie. Coke. Tea goes in a similar category to a drink of warm milk as far as the initial physiological change, so it could go either way if I'm already sleepy. Although, it's just occurred to me - you're American, so you're probably talking about iced tea, aren't you?
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It's not like I have a choice. =P And I'm not exactly at a low latitude, either, so maybe our sun rises later than your sun. (I'm like 40 degrees north. I have no idea what latitude Australia is, but maybe you're closer to the equator than me or something. *nodnod*)
Ah, see caffiene only works for me when it's cold, ie. Coke. Tea goes in a similar category to a drink of warm milk as far as the initial physiological change, so it could go either way if I'm already sleepy. Although, it's just occurred to me - you're American, so you're probably talking about iced tea, aren't you?
I don't even think Mountain Dew has much effect on me. So it's not the heat of the drink either.
No, I meant legit tea. I don't think it's that uncommon/unheard of to drink hot tea in America. Or maybe just around here. Or maybe I just don't know how often non-Americans have hot tea so I have nothing to compare it to.
When it was my turn to bring in food for my philosophy class last year, I brought in tea and scones. It was pwnsome.
But I admit that I did have iced tea today.*will stop babbling about tea now*
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True enough! :P It was only still dark when I got up in the very middle of winter, and only before I realised that I really only need around 20 minutes including a shower to get ready for anything. I'm 27 degrees south, so there's a fair lattitude difference there - but I hardly ever got up as early as you did either by my calculations you'd still have just under five months of the year rising before dawn if you lived here and still had to get up at the same time. Still, choice or no choice, I tip my hat to you. *tips*
Oooh, legit tea! Fancy, schmancy! *feels sudden craving for scones* *resolves to make some for lunch*
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Not sure whether it's a good thing or not that your school district is as insane as ours...
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Too many trees. I can't stargaze at all at my house because of teh pesky trees.
Not sure whether it's a good thing or not that your school district is as insane as ours...
It's not that insane a school district. Actually, the earliness is the only real complaint I have about it. *hugs her school*
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Climb the trees, goof.*nod* Most of the sky here is covered up, but you can make out maybe a third of the sky? I dunno. And I live near the stupid city so you can't see the pleiades and stuff. But it's still nice. I point out all the different stars to this kid at my bus stop, and everyone else just shuffles awkwardly trying to ignore me. XDno subject
Um, hello? I'm Andrew... have we met?
*pets*
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Well, obviously I realise that many people like to sleep late on the weekends, and often stay up later than they should on weekdays - it was more the extent I was talking about - and the usual (but recently absent) ability to function entirely unhindered by lack of sleep on weekdays as long as I can catch up on the weekend. But maybe I've misjudged you, since less of a whinger than me. :P
*is petted*
Saw-ree!
I've never been an insomniac. I sleep a lot, and love it.
Re: Saw-ree!
And lucky you: enjoy it!
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I can't really empathize. My body just... I dunno. I don't need much sleep, and I adjust really quickly to jet lag and stuff. My laptop gets taken away at 9ish at night, but I'll lie awake in the dark... staring... and staring... and staring... and then I'll get up at 5:30 AM. :P
entirely cutting out caffiene and alcohol, at least for a little while until I stabalise
Whoa, caffeine? *seriously could not survive without all the tea/coffee/chocolate she eats throughout the day*
resurrecting my vegie garden
Yay for veggies! Grow tomatoes. Lots and lots and lots of tomatoes. Seriously. Tomatoes are yummy and you can do anything with them. Plus if you get mad at something, they make the most awesomely satisfying squelching sound and a neat looking stain to boot. :D
Anyhow, hope that all works. :)
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Now I'm passed yesterday's headache - which meant that the only thing I could think about was the desirability of pushing a sharp metal skewer through one temple and out the other - and onto a tolerable dull ache, I'm much happier with the cutting out of caffiene. But cutting out chocolate? Chocolate doesn't have caffiene. *whistles and looks around the room*
And yay for vegies!! I'll put up photos when I've got it planted - at the moment, I've only finished building the rock wall all the way to the water tank and almost finished levelling out the soil inside. I should have taken a "before" photo, because it's amazing how much I've got done. I'll be getting some seedlings this weekend - and tomatoes are high on the list, since they're one of the vegies (well, fruits) we eat very very regularly, make a huge difference with homegrown, and they grow fantastically here pretty much all year around. Haven't thought of deliberately squashing them, though - sounds like fun!
Thanks! I'm feeling significantly better rested already, although I'm still discombobulated and tossed about.
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What types are you planting? Moi, I think my favorite for just chomping down are the little yellow pear tomatoes, but then I slice up romas onto just about anything I eat. (Mum made this chicken-and-broccoli casserole last night. Guess what I stuck on it. XD) And then the big steak tomatoes - I dunno their actual name, I just call 'em steak tomatoes because they're so big and you get the big slices from them - those are the ones that are uberthrowable, and I'll stick half a one on hamburgers. Oh, and cherry tomatoes are good for pizza. Andand, you should make your own dried tomatoes! Drying racks are cheap (at least around here) and they shrink waywayway down, but you can eat the steak tomato slices like chips. I mean, they're all crunchy and yummy and stuff, I keep a bag in my backpack to munch on during classes.
[/is obviously obsessed with tomatoes]
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I've already got some cherry tomatoes which are crazy fruit-producing machines that self-seeded from last year's crop which self-seeded from the previous owners of the house. Beeeaauuutiful flavour.
The ones I'm planting now are romas, because I like having fairly small tomatoes. The big beefsteak tomatoes are cool, but I hate having to throw out half a tomato when I'm just making lunch for one or two people.
Never tried drying them! Hmmm, if I have a vast oversupply I'll have to consider it. :) Probably first on the list for any oversupply, though, is freezing them, because my grandma used to do that and then make the most wonderful tomato soup with them at a moment's notice, because you can peel them easily and defrost/mushify them in a saucepan.
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*feels all sad and nostalgic for when Gma was mobile and in her right mind*
*can't wait for when her tomatoes are ready*
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rawreally rare.)