sleeping problems

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Hello all,
Been awhile, amazingly busy! I may have posted before about sleep problems, can't remember, but my son has difficulty sleeping. He will either lie awake for hours before he can fall asleelp, or he will zonk right out and then wake up in the middle of the night for a couple of hours before he can fall asleep again. He's 14 and has been on various medications before, but right now isn't taking anything. I would love to hear all suggestions, includling medications for anyone who is having or has had trouble with this. He's very frustrated, and difficult to get up in the morning. Thanks so much, looking forward to chatting again!

Have alot of sleep problems also. am prescribed both trazadone and lunesta and rotate the times that they are used. sometimes something that helps me is to "reset." in other words, take a weekend where he is not going to school and has nothing to do, and see if he will get up really early friday morning so his body can tire and he can sleep normally on the weekends but get up at the same time he has to go to school on the weekdays. Another way I do this is Ill stay up say all day friday, and all night, and then all day saturday, and then shut down and body tends to reset and I wake up at a normal time. i have alot of problems with PTSD and bad dreams, so I do this often, he should really only have to do this once or twice to see if it will work for him. hope it helps.

Jayson

You can try feeding him something with Tryptophan before going to sleep or during dinner. Here's a list of foods that have Tryptophan in it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryptophan#Dietary_sources

They also mention that while people feel they are tired after Christmas or Thanksgiving cause of the tryptophan in the turkey, more of it has to do with eating a lot of carbs. So I'm thinking maybe a carbs and meat dinner, would be very conductive in causing sleepiness. I hope that helps.

Have you tried melatonin ? It seems to work well for some kids. Lots of evidence to say that it works, but no reliable studies on the long term effects.
http://www.keepkidshealthy.com/medicine ... blems.html

son takes seroquel & melatonin at night....have tried to get him to do yoga and/or meditation before be to quiet the mind, but he's resistant to doing this.

My son is usually a good sleeper other than the odd time so I haven't given him anything yet. But next year sometime we plan on taking the kids to Disney World for the first time and my son has never been on vacation before. I will definitely have to give him something to get him drowsy so he won't be up all night because of being in a different environment. I on the other hand will not sleep unless I take imovane (Canadian version of Lunesta) and melatonin.

My son is 11 -has always had sleep issues - we've tried everything under the sun and it seems like melatonin, exercise and a bedtime and waking up routine are the things that are currently working for us. Melatonin works about 95% of the time -it seems to lose it's effectiveness after awhile and then we stop and then start it. My son has a routine of watching a little TV and then reading in bed -if he doesn't do that he usually has trouble falling asleep. When he was in public school (we now homeschool) the not being able to fall asleep thing was horrific for him (and me!) but now that he doesn't always have to get up early I let him sleep no later than 9:00- no matter when he fell asleep.

Stress, temperature of his bedroom and just sometimes not being tired are things that will keep him awake. I also don't let him watch movies that may disturb him -he sometimes can't get scary images out of his head so we try to stay away from those.

Not sure it helped but it is such an individual problem you just have to figure out what is keeping him awake or stressed? Even though my son would disagree I really think he needs some physical exercise to relax so we basically bribe? force? him to do the miniumum.

Good Luch

Thanks all for the suggestions. I will check into the melatonin. I am more in favor of finding natural alternatives, but will not turn down meds if they help him. Such a hard thing to find the right balance. This morning when I got him up he said he slept well and had no problems, maybe I should keep a journal and see if I can track the patterns or something?

Encourage him to get as much exercise as possible too. Our daughter is much younger but has similair sleep problems. When she has had alot of exercise chances are she will sleep through the night.
We also use melatonin. I find it helps her fall asleep faster but dosen't make her sleep through the night.

Exercise is a great idea, sometimes it's hard to get him off his butt. He's a gamer and would prefer to play computer games all day. He does like to ride his bike though, maybe I can get him to do that. Thanks!

Our daughter also has trouble sleeping through the night sometimes. We've narrowed the reasons down to a few variables (I think). First we started giving her Melatonin. Then we started noticing that certain foods also made her a litltle "crazy" so we've been eliminating the "stim foods." Also, we found out she has some I yeast and bacteria (the bad kind) in her gut. Since we started probiotics, it's helped. We're also going to get some anti-fungals prescribed to try and eliminate it and hopefully increase the better sleep patterns we've kind of created. It's funny though, because I can pretty much tell if we're going to have one of those long nights where she's awake from about 2 a.m. to about 5 to 6 a.m. Luckily those nights are becoming less frequent (knock on wood).

10 y/o ASD DD has problems sleeping too. It is made much worse when she strays from her normal bedtime on the weekends, but that's special time hubby and I have with her that we game together and it's really important to her. After not being able to get to bed earlier on Sunday and Monday, she's usually over it and exhausted by Tuesday and sleeps fine the rest of the week. LOL! She's on Zoloft which has helped a bit with sleeplessness.

I need to take him to the Dr. I guess and get another opinion on meds to see if anything will help. Seems like he's been tested enough and to enough Dr's. They all have such different opinions, and sometimes it's hard to decide what's best for him.