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!
no subject
Not sure whether it's a good thing or not that your school district is as insane as ours...
no subject
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*
no subject
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. XD