How many of us have sleeping problems?

Post Reply New Topic

I was always a bad insomniac until my son was born. Now I'm tired. lol Well, not tonight because I ate too late. When I eat too late, my body and brain can't relax

I'm the opposite. I can't sleep on an empty stomach, and having a stuffed gut helps me fall asleep faster. It's possibly a psychological thing, because I tend to eat as a way to comfort myself when bored or upset.

I've only tried it once but it worked for me. I even slept in.

Something interesting on the Discovery channel about light and sleep. I'm only picking up tidbits (I'll watch it with more concentration tomorrow) but they're saying that we need exposure to sunlight early in the morning and less night at night to sleep. Probably why people say turn off the TV and computer an hour before you decide to sleep.

I have trouble going to sleep, because there is always something else that I want to do, and I can't stop doing things that interest me. Once I convince myself to go to sleep, though, I sleep very well, and don't want to get up. Once I can get myself to stop doing things, I can sleep endlessly.

This also is similar to my mindset on some things.

I have sleep pattern disorder. My sleeping time oscillates.

Pretty hopeless and chaotic, and I'm often tinkering about with something or other until 03:00 because going to bed at say, 23:00 has never worked for me - I just don't sleep at all then.
When I do finally go to bed (because I think "I really should stop now") I'm usually still thinking about what I was doing and lay there restless between brief naps or sometimes, hallelujah, I'm actually tired enough to sleep pretty quickly.
When I was younger I could keep going for two days without any sleep, and just have a nap at the end of it. Those days are long gone now and I try to at least manage an extended nap every night, but I'll sometimes doze during the day too.

Central sleep apnea: my primitive brain forgets to breathe, which both wakes me up (usually not all the way to conscious, fortunately) and means I never get into deep sleep. I have some restless leg syndrome, too.

I don't sleep very well though tend to skip through various issues with it. At the moment I fall asleep about 10 - 11pm ish, normally while watching tv with my wife and then wake up at about 3am and can't get back to sleep for hours and then have to be up at 6:30am to wake my son up for school. Forcing myself to stay awake earlier doesn't help much either

I have a circadian disorder called irregular sleep-wake pattern, and I also have severe sleep apnea (both central and obstructive). (Both of which are untreated so far so I'm constantly sleepy.

I have a lot of sleeping problems.

I have a really hard time falling asleep, even if I'm exhausted. I can't seem to slow down or switch of my brain enough to relax and fall asleep. Sometimes I get anxious when trying to sleep and can't stop thinking about things that have been causing me stress. I usually need to stim (rock back and forth or shake my feet) in bed while trying to fall asleep, and when there is someone else in the room this is obviously a problem and I have to try to avoid stimming in order to not keep someone else awake or annoy them, but then I find it double harder to fall asleep because I need to stim. I need to feel pressure on my body and I usually use my blanket for that, but sometimes it's too hot for that. I usually wake up several times every night and it's often hard for me to fall asleep again.

As a result of my sleeping problems I'm very often tired and don't feel up to dealing with certain things.

I used to never go to sleep unless I was completely exhausted-- Which meant being awake for 20+ hours at a time. That conflicted a lot with school, and I forced myself to go to sleep at semi-regular intervals. However, it still easily takes me 45 minutes or more to fall asleep. It also doesn't help that my body clock is being abused every time my sister and niece go to bed, and we share bedrooms. They, for some stupid reason, need to turn on the light and make a whole fuss. Most of the time, I wake up. My body clock is stumbling.

So yeah, I have some sleep problems. Sometimes, I wake up repeatedly during the night for no real reason, probably because of the aforementioned reason above.

When I was young, I had really bad sleeping problems. I was always afraid someone was going to come get me while I was asleep. Every shadow on the wall freaked me out. When I first understood what death was, I had panic attacks so bad that I could have been put away for a while. I still have those attacks sometimes at night, though not nearly like when I was younger.

For folks who are having trouble with sleep, I have an idea to try that I just started. Earplugs. My wife snores, and being a light sleeper, waking up often meant I was up for the night. I have gotten full nights of sleep for the first time in a long time after putting in earplugs. At the very least it is worth a try.

I am an extremely light sleeper and it usually takes me a while to fall asleep. Any kind of noise is likely to wake me up. People outside talking is one of the worst for me. It is quite normal for me to wake up once or twice in the early morning and then go back to sleep again.

Hotel beds are even worse. I need to be really tired to be able to sleep well in them and it usually takes a few hours on the first night. Same goes for cars and planes. Last time I flew overseas I had a whole row to myself and could not sleep at all. If I do sleep in a car, it only takes a tap of the brake and I'm fully alert again.

I normally need to concentrate on something to fall asleep, such as book. Once I realize that I'm having trouble concentrating, I know that I have a good chance of getting to sleep.

Appropriate post... I am in the proces of (not) recovering from a sleepless night in which I only got an hour and a half of sleep and ended up waking up to a nightmare about the immediate underlying cause. With autism, that endless train of thoughts sometimes just cannot be put on hold for the night and continues while you are trying to get off to sleep. There is also an additional genetic cause in which there is low activity in the gene that controls the final stage in the body's natural synthesis of melatonin. See the following link for details:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin#Autism

What I do to try to make sleep easier is to halt any activity that might lead to too many thoughts about an hour before bedtime, spend that time listening to relaxing nature sounds (rain, thunderstorms etc) or a hypnosis recording that I have, avoid blue light in favor of reds or grays (see link above for light info... blue light destroys melatonin) and take a half tab of melatonin as needed. It seems to help about 60-70% of the time. I also keep my iPod with those same nature sounds on it in bed with me in case I need more relaxation but usually if it gets that far, that will not help much. Last night I ended up taking two half tabs and still could not sleep. I usually end up with a sleepless or sleep limited night every 3 or 4 days, but last night was especially severe.

I don't know if this will pass as appropriate (I will watch my language here), but in last night's case the cause was noise from an overly aggressive, nosy and selfish downstairs neighbor. The guy came in at 8 PM, did a lot of hooting and hollering, then went in to the bedroom and apparently had sex either with himself or someone else (I only heard one voice until much later). He emerged only 10 minutes later and much quieter, then two hours later while I was taking care of my needs, he began whacking on the walls with something that sounded like a tablespoon. I think it was intentional and he was trying to irritate me but I just could not get the thought of his cowardly selfishness out of my mind.

I sleep like a baby - literally. I wake up every 2-3 hours on a good night. On a bad night, it's more like every hour, or sometimes every half hour. I usually fall back to sleep pretty quickly once I've been asleep already, but I never really seem to reach the deeper stages of sleep.
I'm also prone to anxiety dreams, many of which involve being lost somewhere, or trying to figure out something I'm struggling with. Sometimes, I'll find myself back in high school, and unable to find where I need to be, or trying to take some sort of important test that makes no sense. Often, I won't be able to remember any details when I wake up, just the sense of being lost, or struggling with something.
I can't remember the last time I had a full night of uninterrupted sleep. I suspect it's been quite a number of years. I also don't remember how it feels not to be tired.