I don't know how to sleep

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I know someone mentioned this before.. but I feel like I actually don't know how to go to sleep.

I've always had trouble sleeping. As a baby I had to be "moving in three dimensional space" to go to sleep. (meaning my mom couldn't rock me, she had to walk around and rock me.) I remember so many nights up as a child, looking at the clock, knowing how horrible the morning was going to be when I had to get up, getting more and more upset as the night wore on, many times not falling asleep until just before I had to wake up.
Now, I take quite a lot of benadryl to sleep, which I've found to be the least harmful thing I can take. It was Seroquel for awhile, which just did horrible things to me. Benadryl seems to at least not have much in the way of side effects. But the point is still I don't fall asleep, I take medication so that I pass out.

There's something about the actual process of relaxing and going to sleep that I never managed to learn. I think it's something you're supposed to be born knowing, but I guess I missed that.

Has anyone who wasn't born knowing how to go to sleep ever somehow learned? Or is it something that has to be innate?

I have exactly the same problem and I've been like this since I was a kid. as a teen I was an absolute insomniac. my body clock is off, is what a sleep doc told me.

I tried prescriptions to fall asleep and all of them mess me up. now I'm taking benadryl and it actually works better. I take it about 2 hours before I plan to go to bed, then a half tab of valium as I go to bed. I have to wear earplugs so I stay asleep, because every noise seems loud. it's the only way I can sleep enough to handle day person responsibilities.

my body won't go to sleep by itself unless I wear it out beyond a reasonable level.

I didn't have problems with insomnia until my late teens. It grew much more severe in my early twenties. If I want to make it through the night, I have to take something (has been tylenol pm, right now benadryl), wear ear plugs and a sleep mask (blindfold) to keep out the light. Even with all these, I often wake up at least once in the night.

I know; I have some circadian-rhythm problems myself. You might give melatonin a try; it's pretty safe (OTC nutritional supplement; check with your doc for possible interactions, etc.) and it works for some people. So far the really good scientific evidence points toward melatonin being most useful for jet lag, but there's also some stuff that points to a possible use in autistic people with sleep problems.

Also... relaxation, meditation, that sort of thing--not the religious sort, but just the sort that teaches you how to relax your muscles and stop thinking so fast. That can be helpful with getting to sleep. The point is not to concentrate...

If you have long term sleep problems and you go to the doctor for a sleep aid, be sure to specify that you expect the problem to be long-term, and it isn't just a short term insomnia. Sleeping pills are easy to build a tolerance to (i.e., they don't work as well because your body gets used to them).

Try melatonin. It's something our bodies produce anyway, but I think sometimes people on the spectrum just don't. You can find it with supplements. If you have a Trader Joe in your area, they have a chewable tablet.

My AS son has had trouble falling asleep since birth. Life was hell for a while, because he could NOT fall asleep. Finally, when he was about 7, we discovered melatonin. He has a tablet every night. If he doesn't have it, it's really hard for him to fall asleep, and so he AND his brother, who shares a room with him, are really tired the next day.

I've never taken it myself, but my husband has. He says the only problem with it is that if he has to wake up in the middle of the night to use the toilet, he feels kind of dizzy. But he's really sensitive that way.

I believe that I have a circadian rhythm disorder. If not interfered with, I will sleep naturally from around 3-4 a.m, until roughly 2-3 pm Whenever I try to go to bed in the evening, I just toss and turn until the wee hours. Melatonin works, but tends to depress me if taken for long term.

I use melatonin, benadryl (usually 100 mg) and klonopin. It's the benadryl that actually gets me to sleep. I think the melatonin helps, but the klonopin is mainly a keeping-down-anxiety type of thing. Klonopin is one of the longest-acting benzos, so it's not like I take it at night and it wears off by the morning.

The benadryl is wonderful, but what's confusing is that many prescription sleep aids don't work for me. At one point I was prescribed ambien. I've heard stories about how people figure it's going to work more like an anxiety medication does and take awhile to kick in, so they take it right before driving home on the assumption that they'll be getting sleepy once they get home, and then fall asleep at the wheel, so I figured the stuff would knock me out. I could take two of 'em and then be up all night. It just didn't do a thing.
That's part of what leads me to believe that there's an essential part of the process of going to sleep that I'm just missing. I don't think it's a normal part. I've tried relaxation exercise and stuff without results, so I feel as though perhaps whatever it is that those are designed to help with isn't the issue that I have. Does that make sense? Like if the process of sleep takes A, B, and C to achieve, and most insomniacs are missing A, but I'm missing B, then an insomnia treatment that addresses the missing A isn't going to do anything for me.

As a child I was afraid and paranoid of everything. I had this delusion that aliens were in my room and we're going to harm me. So I had to have all the lights on and yelled for my parents all the time. I didn't sleep too well then. I slept in my parents bed until a late age.

After I wasn't so afraid anymore. I still had trouble sleeping though. The bed was so comfortable I'd shake and want to cover up in the blankets and was too excited by it to sleep. After that part of the night was over I had this stim where I'd use my hand to cover the light or clock and block it from my vision, reappear, block it, reappear, block it reappear, block it, reappear...

Now I have phases of good sleeping and bad sleeping. It seems unavoidable. For a month or more I'll sleep terribly and then it'll be okay again. Right now I'm in a bad phase which just started. I'm not allowed to use anything other than melatonin, and melatonin makes me wake up a bunch in the night usually, sometimes it works, other times not at all. It's kind of hit-and-miss it seems...

Melatonin stops working for me if I take it every night. It helps if I don't. Mostly I just live with the fact that I don't quite sleep, or it takes me three or four hours to fall asleep.

Has anyone tried the liquid melatonin? I wonder if a large, rapidly absorbed dose would work better.

My shrink thinks my meds should make me sleep, but they don't.

i do. i think to much and cant stop shifting in bed. also i cant sleep until everyone else is asleep, because moving around and lights on outside of my door really irritate me.
during summer when there's no school, i usually get up at 4 pm and go to sleep at 6 am or so....i dont know if my rythm is off or something. but i really prefer staying up during the night. it's wierd, too. cause i love the daytime....maybe its because the night is secluded.

I remember reading somewhere that there was once a sleep medication that was inserted in the rectum, right before bed. This would work really quickly, since it didn't have to go through the normal digestive route. I wish there were something like that around, now.

i am never one to get tired slowly and go to sleep. on average i sleep five to six hours a night. just work on stuff until i literally "pass-out" then wake up six hours later.

I take 20-25 mg of melatonin a night. It knocks me out, but doesn't keep me out. I usually wake up about 4 hours later and fight to get back to sleep until it's time to get up.

I have been an insomniac for as long as I can remember. As a kid I'd drive my mother nuts by getting up and wandering around the house in the middle of the night, to the point where she started sleeping on the floor in front of my bedroom door to shut down my nighttime exploration. My dad got fed up with this situation, and finally told me that laying perfectly still was the same thing as sleep, so if I couldn't sleep I should just lie perfectly still. This seemed rather convincing when I was five or six, and it's a habit I never gave up. In a weird way it works, too, especially if you can put yourself into something of a trance (kind of like meditation, I guess?). I simply physically cannot sleep a lot of the time, and that's the next best thing for me.

I find that melatonin and sleeping meds either make me way too groggy in the morning, or only keep me asleep for a very short time, which for some reason makes me feel worse than not sleeping at all. I also hate all the lectures about the things I ought to do to cure insomnia (don't drink caffeine! go to sleep at a regular time each night! take a warm bath! don't do anything in your bed but sleep!). I've tried all of that and it has never made any difference, so I'm pretty sure this is just how my brain works. If you are the same, then all I can really suggest is working on feeling relaxed even when you can't sleep and know you can't sleep.