Sleep Troubles?

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How many other people have problems sleeping? With in the last two months I seems to of developed a problem sleeping. I now sleep 3 to 5 hours a day. And struggle to get any sleep at all and to clear my mind of thoughts. I maybe fine and feeling sleepy when Im up but as soon as I lay down and try and sleep my mind starts racing about heaps of stuff and then i can't sleep again.

Hello. I've had trouble sleeping all my life. Soemtimes I've had an almost normal ability to go to sleep, but usually it's very messy. I have too much stuff in my mind when it's time to sleep, and when I wake up in the morning it's almost impossible to get up.

I usually did not have trouble sleeping as a child other than getting up too early for the rest of the family. As I have gotten older though, I have had more and more trouble.

I understand about the racing mind thing however. There are nights that my thoughts are going so fast and furious that I cannot fall asleep no matter what I try to do.

I have suffered insomia for years. Used to drink a lot in the past. But now I take Trazodone. I now sleep lightly at best though I might get 8 hours sleep at best.

When I was 8 i started to get a sleep problem, it would be 4.00 am before i finally dozed off but then i was up at 7.00 am. I had been fine for a couple of years though due to meds but i am cutting down so fast and it has started to develop again. It is the same as the rest of the posts, the racing thoughts, they conversations of the day going around and around. It's driving me crazy and I'm back to dropping off at 4.00am again. I make sure I am actually in bed for 1.00am at the latest, that has no effect though.

Always took me at least an hour to get to sleep, And waking up on time sucked. It works a lot better if I simply don't try to sleep before 2-3:00 AM. Then, I can get to sleep relatively quick, and wake up just fine. Going to sleep earlier simply doesn't work.

And occasionaly, I just can't sleep at all. Sometimes until 8:00 next morning, sometimes I just skip it completely that night.

Yes, this is one of my biggest problems in my life right now.

My entire life I've had trouble sleeping and staying asleep. Lately it's been getting a lot worse, to the point where I've decided I have to see my GP and hopefully do something about it. I've tried all different things on my own to sleep better, but nothing works consistently enough to be worth it.

Many times I have trouble getting to sleep, and I'll be up for hours, just lying in bed. Lately, though, my lack of sleep has caught up with me and I fall asleep, although I wake up frequently in the night.

I'm sure I posted this before, but it might help someone.
I'm not sure what you can do about waking up, but this is a trick I developed to get to sleep.
In order to stop the racing thoughts you have to develop a bit of concentration. You could try focusing on a mental image and going over it in great detail or something like this. While this gets yout mind off your problems, it is still working and so it takes a while to get to sleep still.
What I began doing is thinking of something random, like pickles, then I will force myself to think of something else that is totally unrelated, like sailboats. The trick is to avoid free associating, and in fact do just the opposite. I find that this replicates the state of mind I experience when I am bordering on sleep naturally. After a little while it seems my subconcious just takes over this activity, and I drift off. In the mean time it can be quite interesting to see what sort of semi random thoughts you come up with, and to observe the way your mind naturally wants to follow a train of association.

Yes, I often have trouble sleeping at night... I'll often find myself tossing and turning in bed and then just turning on Adult Swim and not falling asleep until 3 in the morning or so. Fortunately, for my last semester of senior year things worked out in my favor... none of my classes start until 2 in the afternoon

My problem isn't so much about getting enough sleep as it is about sleeping during appropriate hours. Lately, I've been having trouble sleeping any earlier than 4am and have, for the past week been alternating between sleeping for 24hrs straight and being awake for another 24hrs. Mostly, however, I sleep in the daytime and don't wake up until late afternoon or early evening which messes up my body's circadian rythm.

I'm not working at the moment and when I do get a job, it's going to be all the more difficult to adjust to a normal waking daytime schedule. Maybe the winter is putting me in some kind of hybernation mode since this seems to happen each year around late December through early February.

when I get stressed or nervous I cant sleep. I have literally gone days with out sleepiing more than a couple hours. My longest strech with out sleep, was 72 hours. My longest strech of mimimal sleep I can remember right off was 8hours of sleep in 6 days. When my mom was sick I didnt sleep but a about 3 hours a night.

Exactly the same here. Going to bed early (which I tried for many many years) does not help at all, it only makes it worse. Now I usually go to bed between 1:00 a.m. and 3:00 am, but it totally depends on how tired an sleepy I am, which is different every day. Sometimes I sleep 8 hours or more for days, and other times I sleep only about 2 hours (I feel really terrible if that happens a couple of times in a row).

When I go to bed before I am really very sleepy, I just do not fall asleep, or I wake up in the middle of the night and I am not able to fall asleep again then. It's a bit difficult to time it, because when I do get sleepy it usually strikes me by suprise. Then I got to go to bed very quickly or else one of two things happen: or I fall asleep on the spot, or I am over it and it takes me hours to become sleepy again.

Another life-long insomniac here. Why does it seem it's so prevalent among aspies? And it seems like for most of us it's because our minds can't turn off. Hmm.
I use prescription medicine to fall asleep - my psychiatrists have always felt that laying in bed for hours ruminating about negative things isn't good for me. I agree.

I often thought about negative things too when I was younger when I was trying to get asleep, but a a certain moment I felt I had a choice to think about negative or positive things. And I decided to go for the positive (it's probably just a sort of luck that I was able to switch to positive thinking, reading some books about practical psychologie helped me with that). It is easyer to go to sleep since that time, and even if I can't sleep I feel a lot better now than before "the switch".

Deleted since the mods won't lock the "RAGE" thread

Last edited by MsTriste on 01 Feb 2006, 7:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.