Question about sleep from the mom of an 11 year old

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1Oryx2
Toucan
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11 Aug 2008, 9:08 pm

Your son sounds like me. I'd fall asleep at 11-12 but wake up at 1 AM. I'd sit awake reading or playing Pokemon until 4 in the morning. I'd maybe catch a couple hours before having to get up for school giving me a grand total of four or five hours of sleep a night.

Come the third day of this I would crash and sleep properly.

ASD kids don't always need the same amount of sleep as NT's, but I found that it was adrenalin that keept me up all night and kept me running on only 4 hours of rest. Now I take anti-anxiety drugs to put me to sleep every night.



WillThePerson
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12 Aug 2008, 8:09 am

Well i've always had sleep issues, and many sources indicate that sleep problems may be a part of Asperger's.
I don't mind it much, as long as I don't stay up all night.



blondie
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15 Aug 2008, 8:56 pm

My thoughts keep me awake but right now I am on risperdal 1mg to help me sleep and it works quite effectively. I drink milk not warm milk but it could be warm around bedtime when I take my risperdal 1mg. Sometimes I take a warm shower before bed and I think that might help some.


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LifeOfTheSpectrum
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20 Aug 2008, 1:06 am

Valigan. Get a prescription for Valigan, give him 6 tablets before bed, and he should go to sleep soon.
Slowly decrease the amount with age.



BokeKaeru
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23 Aug 2008, 2:56 am

Again, it probably is that he's a night person. I understand that on school nights he can't stay up till 1-3, but perhaps a later "bedtime" would help - and no bedtime on the weekends, if that's possible. As contradictory as it seemed, I would get MORE sleep if my bedtime was later rather than earlier, because I had more time to wear myself out and get all that excess energy out into something else - if I was forced to go to sleep at 9, I could easily lie in bed till 2 (ick!), but if I was allowed to go to bed at 11, I could fall asleep by midnight or 12:15. All my energy went into reading or drawing or playing on the computer rather than sinking slowly into madness in my bed. My parents never quite understood that, though, that if I wasn't tired, it could easily take 3, 4 or 5 hours to fall asleep, because my brain would be racing and producing very unpleasant thoughts. So yeah, probably just by virtue of being a night person, high school is not going to be easy getting up for, but earlier bedtimes will NOT help his sleep situation if he has the same sort of late-night thinking that I do when I'm bored and can't sleep!

If I REALLY need to get up the next day, or if I'm just tired of my brain keeping me up, I'll take Melatonin. Nothing stronger, though. I've been on enough prescription drugs, and Ambien messed me up quite a lot the one time I did try it. And to think that I laughed when the doctor told me that a side effect was drowsiness!