Sleep problems

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I think sleeping problems are pretty common among Aspies. Do you have difficulties falling/staying asleep?

For me, the thing is that I'm almost never tired when I'm supposed to be. I usually go to bed around midnight and have to wake up at 7:30 for school. Since I'm kind of a night person I usually feel very awake and productive at midnight and need ages to fall asleep, half an hour at least, usually 1-2 hours. This is even worse when there's noise, like neighbours partying or faint TV sounds. Sometimes I don't fall asleep at all and spend the entire night reading or writing. If I can get up whenever I want to, I usually go to bed at 2/3 am, wake up at 8/9 and finally get up at 11. That would be the perfect rhythm for me, but that's just not an option when in school.

Yes I have horrible sleep problems.....it takes me 1 to 3 hours to fall asleep. I also get to caught up in reading at night and sometimes don't get to bed until really late........but then when I do get to bed I just can't turn down my thoughts and fall asleep!

I have epic sleep problems. I gave up trying to fight against them as it was causing me more stress than it was worth. My sleep "pattern" varies tremendously - it's probably the one thing about my life that has any significant variation; for everything else I do the same things at pretty much the same time (relative to when I woke up) on pretty much the same days, lol. At the moment I'm falling asleep at about 09.00 and waking up around 15.00 :/ In a couple of weeks it could be 17.00-00.00 or 03.00-12.00, I dunno. At any given point I could also have a bad bout of insomnia, not sleep for 36 hours and end up with a completely new pattern. It's not that much fun being asleep when everyone else is awake or some other weird pattern but I tried and tried and tried to get a sustainable rhythm but it just doesn't work. I've always been this way, I can remember being 7-8 and sometimes just getting a few hours sleep a night because I just could not get to sleep.

My sleep is awful.

I cannot sleep at night at all, only during the day, and although I can fall asleep aright most nights I cannot stay asleep for very long. I then nap again later although i try not to.

My circadian rhythm is nuts lol

My mind never lets me sleep, it takes me 2-4 hours to get to sleep.

What about noise, do you need silence to fall asleep?
I almost always use earplugs. I don't mind noise like storm or rain, it actually helps me sleep, but if there's people talking, TV sounds, music, footsteps... then I'm far too alert to fall asleep, and every noise makes sleep more and more impossible.

It depends on the noise for me. Constant white noise type noise, specifically my computer fan, doesn't bother me at all and is actually quite soothing. Any other sort of noise keeps me in the state of alertness you described and I cannot sleep.

Yeah, white noise is awesome. I should probably put half an hour of rainstorm on my iPod.

I'd love to live next to a fairly stormy sea so I could fall asleep every night listening to the waves. Another acceptable alternative would be to move somewhere with lots of crickets or cicadas - that would have the added bonus of being able to capture them to feed to my spiders

I used to live in Aberystwyth in Wales right by the sea which was amazing because it was often windy/rainy (being Wales) and even if not, the sound of the waves really helped me sleep. I also use ear plugs to block out sounds of people talking/TV/music/radio etc but still have constant arguments with my dad every night about the noise of the TV.

I can only manage to sleep 4 hour nights. I find it very annoying. I got my doctor to prescribe sleeping pills for me, this morning.

My sleep quality is very low and I have no sleep pattern. I hear the noise around and be half awake during the last few hours of my sleep. Then I yawn all day long. I hate it.

I suck at falling asleep. I went to bed later than I usually tried to last night to make myself feel more tired, and I didn't fall asleep until about 4 hours later.

My sleep patterns can get very messed up if I let them - luckily I don't have much chance nowadays. My preferred pattern would to go to bed about 2 or 3 in the morning and get up between 10 and 11.

Even with a solid 8 hours from, say, 11 to 7, I am not much good before 10 in the morning.

I prefer not to go to bed until I am fall down exhausted.

But I need noise to get to sleep. My brain has to be engaged (distraced, almost) in some way. Usually it's lectures or speech radio programmes/podcasts or radioplays/audiobooks. Music stands too much of a chance of making me engage emotionally - where I do use it, it's a classical radio station very quietly from my radio alarm.

I lived in Shetland for a few years. When it wasn't blissfully windy, I could hear the tide breaking on the beach - fine sounds to go to sleep to.

I didn't really used to have trouble falling asleep until my anxiety and paranoia really kicked into high gear. Nowadays I have a lot of thoughts (not many of them pleasant) going thru my head at night, and have to distract myself from them by goofing around on the internet until at least 1 or 2 in the morning.

However, some things that I've found helpful are:

- My soft, cuddly and warmth - generating raschel Cars blanket....

- Having a bed full of plushies.

- Having Kenny Loggins' "Return to Pooh Corner" and a recording of Meryl Streep reading "The Velveteen Rabbit" with George Winston playing piano on my MP3 player.

- Visualizing being comfortably "sandwiched" b/tw two anthro Cars as I lie in bed

- Taking at least 4 Advil or allergy pills before bed (I don't personally recommend this unless you are absolutely sure of what you are doing, but it's worked for me so far)

- Having tea or hot chocolate before bed.

- Waiting until you're completely tired out to go to bed.

- Telling yourself a story or talking to a stuffed animal as you lie quietly.

There was also a thread earlier somewhere about some of us running a fan provide white noise to help sleep, so that might be another option you could try.