I wonder what I'm in for as I get older...

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At the present time, age 36, I'm in a spot where I'm living at home and have had odd temp jobs - most of these temp to hire - without anything seriously panning out.

What's made me particularly nervous, aside from people agreeing I'm a great worker and still not getting hired, I find that even $15-$20 hour jobs might be more of a load on my nervous system than I can take. It seems like most days can go reasonably well unless I'm not trying to crunch the numbers too hard.

My last few jobs I could work okay at my own pace, if work started getting particularly complex I needed caffeine to get through it, now my body is starting to rebel quite a bit against the caffeine. If someone puts a seemingly unsolvable problem on my plate - something like this happened today - I can within a couple hours give myself such a migraine that I can barely do my job from that point forward, almost have to just look busy and count the minutes till I can leave. That's only happened a couple times in the last two months or so but it's worrying how easily stress can trigger that.

I've been short on sleep all of my life as well unfortunately. I'm the kind of person who can't choose when he falls asleep, whether he stays asleep, and it leaves me with usually 5 1/2 to 6 hours of sleep on average. If my schedule relents and I can sleep in another half hour my body keeps me up for another half hour in compensation. If I try to go to bed earlier I'll either not fall asleep for another two or three hours or fall into semi-sleep for half an hour to an hour, then be up for another two or three hours - or the rest of the night. Side effects of sleep meds are prohibitive, melatonin seems like it can set a rhythm but I need to stay on it.

I guess at this point I'm wondering, for anyone else here whose been on the same trajectory, is maybe in their 40's, 50's, or 60's now, what happened at your end? We're you able to pull out of it? Did it end up in a disability situation of some kind? I'm worried because I'm one of those who'll likely be rated for the rest of my life as too functional for assistance (so long as that assistance is a consideration of autism) and I'm hoping that the work world and just the necessities that needing to pay my way in life put on me don't have me wedged in such a manner that I'll visibly stay functional, keep getting worse, and eventually just have it all go on me before I've even hit my 50th birthday. I know the US is a disease-care country so warning signs aren't a valid excuse, just destroyed health when it actually comes.

Let me know if any of you have discovered some tricks with, say, budgeting energy for work or being able to sleep. I'll need as many preemptive pointers as I can get.

I can't answer a lot of what you want to know because I'm only 30. I do know though that lettuce makes people sleepy. It might sound odd but I'm not making it up - it's a recognised health benefit by nutritionists. Having a salad before you want to sleep could help.

I need to sleep in 1-1/2 hour increments. So, if I only have half an hour, I need to get up. With practice, I can sleep whenever I feel tired--I don't have any issues with going to bed early in the evening or when folks are heading off to work. Like this morning--I planned to sleep when the snow arrived this morning. It helps to schedule activities so you don't do anything that interferes with sleep--such as trying to fix a computer issue. Let it go and work on it some other time. As I said, this takes practice. But, you need to do it for your health.

Also, count sleep in terms of 1-1/2 increments in which you actually fall asleep. I can usually get by with three--four or more is great. Not hours.