20 Years of insomnia cured

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I just read some of the Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder post and thought it might be useful for other if I share my story.

I'm 43 years old now and ever since I came back from military service as an 18yo boy, I've had terrible insomnia. It would take me 2-3 hours to fall asleep, if I fell asleep at all and I'd often wake up in the middle of the night, usually around 2am and 4am. My poor mom didn't know how else to help me, so she used to give me Syndols, the strongest non-prescription pain killer you could get in South Africa. I'm sure that's caused all kinds of other problems for my health.
Well, that was my life for 22 years... I got used to getting by with very little sleep, but I was always tired and always felt like I needed an afternoon nap. Coffee and cigarettes!! ! At one point I was smoking more than 2 packets of cigarettes per day (40-45 cigs).

4 years ago I was alone in Australia without any family or social support, when I got a kidney stone stuck somewhere in a pipe. Not a good thing for someone who already has an anxiety disorder!! ! I started stressing about my blood pressure and of course the stressed caused a myriad of other physical symptoms. I thought I was dying with so many things going wrong and the doctors kept telling me there's nothing wrong. The radiologist had marked the kidney stone as non-obstructive and said that it's not a problem, so they all ignored that!!
Long story that I won't go into now, but it took from March until September to get the kidney stone diagnosed properly and things got better once that was removed. I was living alone and in such a panicked state that I'd go to the hospital almost every night and sleep in the waiting room, afraid that if anything happened to me there'd be nobody there to help me.
Never mind my usual insomnia, I just was not able to sleep during those months from being way too stressed out. Psychiatrist had put me on Zoloft, but even that didn't get me to sleep. Finally the weirdest thing that did the trick for me was to play Bejeweled on my iphone! Laugh if you must, but it really did do the trick for me. The iPhone 3 was small enough for me to lie on my side in a position I could fall asleep in and the game was something repetitive to focus on and took my mind off the other things it would normally focus on that stressed me out.
Long after I stopped the Zoloft, I continued to play bejeweled and continued to fall asleep within 20-30 minutes.

Then I changed to a Windows Phone and lost access to that particular iphone version of Bejeweled and the Windows version just didn't seem to do it for me, but I found that I was able to fall asleep within an hour. I don't think it'll happen overnight... it was probably close to a year of my life that I went to sleep while playing Bejeweled, but it seems to have broken a 20 year habit for me.

Now a few month ago I got diagnosed with sleep apnea and I'm using a CPAP machine to help me keep breathing at night. Well... it is the ultimate cure for my type of insomnia!! I use a full-face mask and I'm not sure whether it's the mask pushing my eyes closed, the forced breathing against the pressured air or the humming sound of the machine next to my bed (probably all of them), but I'm asleep within minutes!

I don't know whether it'll work for everyone and I'm sure it's an expensive piece of equipment, but if I were to stop using this CPAP machine and went back to my old insomniac habits, I'd certainly pay the money to get hold of one of these machines so that I can fall asleep so quickly. Not sure if there's a cheaper way to achieve the same results.

There's something about Bejewled that relaxes me. It's the combination of the special effects and the mesmerizing space aged music in the background. The backgrounds are also a relaxing shade of blue.