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Sleeping Problems

KevinMao133

KevinMao133

Well-Known Member
I don’t know if I’m the only one who suffers from this problem

Despite everything that I have done and will continue to do, one thing is setting me back: sleeping anxiety

I sleep well generally but last couple days been different. From overthinking or feeling anxious, I don’t know, something is up

how do I not feel anxious and fall asleep quickly? I go to sleep at 9, yet often falls asleep at 11 or 12

It’s really weird
 
I'm a little thrown off. You say that you sleep generally well but "despite everything that I have done and will continue to do, one thing is setting me back" makes it sound like a chronic problem. Has it just been the last couple of days? If so, that's nothing to worry about. Don't make a big deal out of a couple of days.

That being said you can try valerian root and melatonin.
 
KevinMao133 said:
I don’t know if I’m the only one who suffers from this problem

Despite everything that I have done and will continue to do, one thing is setting me back: sleeping anxiety

I sleep well generally but last couple days been different. From overthinking or feeling anxious, I don’t know, something is up

how do I not feel anxious and fall asleep quickly? I go to sleep at 9, yet often falls asleep at 11 or 12

It’s really weird
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You can't suddenly stop feeling anxious at bedtime. Your neurotransmitters are elevated and that takes time to be metabolized. If it is an occasional thing a valium might do the trick. Or a 10 mg. melatonin. Or 50 mg. Benedryl.

There's a bunch of things you can do to overcome insomnia and it may be that the insomnia is what is enabling the anxiety. Screen time, irregular sleep hours, caffeine, staying busy right up to bedtime, inadequate exercise during the day all keep you from falling asleep. You go to bed, you don't fall asleep and then the worry kicks in because your mind is still active and has nothing to distract it. I've had times when not falling asleep when I needed to caused anxiety over being too tired to function the next day. That's really messed up.

www.sleepfoundation.org

Insomnia: Symptoms, Causes, and Treatments

Insomnia is a sleep disorder that affects many people. Learn about symptoms, causes, and treatments.
www.sleepfoundation.org www.sleepfoundation.org

The best way to deal - in fact, the only way to deal - with pre-bedtime anxiety is to learn not to be anxious. Once it starts, you're done for. What do you feel anxious about? Is there something you can do to fix the situation so you don't have anything to make you anxious? Severe anxiety calls for therapy. Mild anxiety might be handled thru Zen Buddhism, lifestyle changes, and meditation.

Anxiety that happens frequently requires that you figure out why you are feeling anxious. Feeling anxious about a problem never solved anything. It is a stimulation of your flight/fight system when neither fight nor flight is a useful response. Great response to the possibility of a tiger on your track but useless for job or family or financial or legal stuff.

There are also people who are biochemically more inclined to anxiety. I know that when I was a kid I never felt anxious about anything. Depressed or angry or excited, sure, but never seriously anxious. My philosophy was Que sera, sera!


Now that I am older, random stuff will just pop into my head or small upsets will happen, and my anxiety demon will blow it all out of proportion even though I have far less at risk than when I was young. I chalk it up to gradual changes in my brain due to age.
 
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It's good you usually sleep well. Just relax as best you can about the situation and sleep will return.

When I'm off my sleep pattern I play a YouTube video before bedtime - search for music to induce sleep. Or find a relaxation practice / meditation to do before bed. This works well for me.
 
I have the same issue. It doesn't matter how tired I am - If I can't turn my brain off then I can't go to sleep.

Earlier this week, I was seriously considering looking for some over-the-counter sleep medication again. I would love to find something that knocks me out quickly and doesn't leave me feeling groggy in the morning.

So far, the best solution I have found is to exercise so my physical fatigue matches my mental fatigue. Then, when I lie down, I think about my special interest, because that pushes the other worries and anxiety out.
 
Au Naturel said:
Now that I am older, random stuff will just pop into my head or small upsets will happen, and my anxiety demon will blow it all out of proportion even though I have far less at risk than when I was young. I chalk it up to gradual changes in my brain due to age.
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That happened to me earlier this week. I have a massive collection of bad memories (most of them are times that I did the wrong thing in a social situation because I didn't understand it then as well as I do now). So a few nights ago, I lay down to go to sleep and it seemed like all of them came to mind, and I was awake for three hours agonizing over past shame, embarrassment, and awkwardness. I kept trying to divert my thoughts to something else, but I kept returning to the negative memories.

My daughter struggles with anxiety and calls this "spiraling".
 
When I first started having major sleep issues, a friend with similar troubles told me that she wished she had never started on the sleeping pills. I try to keep my mealtimes regular, and ration the stress I expose myself to. Situations where I have to struggle to stay awake can leave me unable to find the path into sleep. When I should sleep but can't, I just keep trying to meditate. I often discover that I've been having a lot of short naps while thinking I was awake.
 
I wish I knew I knew a definitive answer to this but unfortunately this is a problem which still plagues me but some things help. Audio book/ podcast of something to distract me but not of anything to dark. I use to use the radio but the news stressed me out and sopped me sleeping. I have a bubble tube, teddies and nice smelling things to help me sleep. Me sleep drastically improved when I was put on fluoxetine to help wi the anxiety. Had no luck with amatriptaline as a sleeping drug it did absolutely nothing.
 
Shevek said:
When I first started having major sleep issues, a friend with similar troubles told me that she wished she had never started on the sleeping pills.
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Agreed.

Several years ago, I complained to my doctor about sleeping issues and he - being nothing more than a licensed prescription factory - prescribed Ambien. I used a whole pill once and a half pill twice. All three times I used it, I was so groggy that I couldn't function until late afternoon - and during that groggy time, I was deeply depressed and nearly suicidal. I googled, "Ambien and suicide" and found a documented correlation. I threw the rest of the bottle out.

A few time a year, I do resort to using Nyquil when I'm not sick, just to sleep. I'm very wary of making a habit of it.
 
I think I mentioned this elsewhere, but getting good sleep for me is like a lifestyle maintenance routine. It starts with eating healthy, exercising hard, and for some reason, taking vitamins and the occasional magnesium supplement. If I miss any of those things for too long, I'm likely to stop sleeping when I need to, have horrible insomnia and feel like absolute garbage over the long-haul.

I only figured the vitamin issue out semi-recently. Without fail, I can't sleep without them. So weird.

Sleeping with ASD is super hard, NTs will never understand (unless they have similar issues due to something else)
 
I sudden unexpected problem situation can give me insomnia. Also right now there's a heatwave that's messing up my ability to sleep. Changes in weather often effect my ability to have a sound sleep.
 
Nervous Rex said:
That happened to me earlier this week. I have a massive collection of bad memories (most of them are times that I did the wrong thing in a social situation because I didn't understand it then as well as I do now). So a few nights ago, I lay down to go to sleep and it seemed like all of them came to mind, and I was awake for three hours agonizing over past shame, embarrassment, and awkwardness. I kept trying to divert my thoughts to something else, but I kept returning to the negative memories.

My daughter struggles with anxiety and calls this "spiraling".
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Spiraling is a good description. Anxiety just starts ramping up and normal rational controls to limit it don't kick in. And it is about stupid stuff, often things you'd forgotten and suddenly popped back into your head. No benefit whatsoever to agonize over it. What is done is done and one moves on, hopefully resolving not to make the same mistakes again. But then that thing you did that blew up 20 years ago pops up .Or the time you could have gotten into life destroying trouble 40 years ago but got lucky instead is suddenly as fresh as the day it happened. .

I think it has something to do with a fear response in the amygdala. You may consciously forget something but the primitive parts of your brain store it forever. What I have to do is to accept what happened, reinforce that I'll avoid it in the future, and then forcibly distract myself for as many days as it takes. I have to break the spiral. The issue isn't the problem, it is my uncontrolled physiological response to it that tears me up. There's no way to think about it and try to reason it out that doesn't contribute to the spiral. How long it takes to return to equilibrium depends on how far along the spiral I got before I interrupted it and how much fear I've generated.

There is also no sin in a little Valium, either. It helps you break the spiral. Just don't abuse it and don't turn it into a crutch.
 
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There was one time, I was more asleep than awake and now, I am more awake then asleep. I could easily fall asleep in the past, but now it feels like a miracle when I actually wake to find: wow, I actually slept?

I got to bed between 8 and 8:30 and wake at 1:30 and then, it is sleep and awake etc. Sometimes my alarm wakes me up at 5 and most times I am awake and readly to get out of bed at 5, which is a huge game changer for me, since in the past, I thought 11am was too early and that was thanks to anti depressants.
 
I used to be my happiest when I went to sleep at 8 PM and woke up at 6 AM to start the day fresh.
But lately, it doesn't matter if I get enough sleep or not, I wake up tired and take an hour (or more) to get out of bed
 
As people get older a few things happen regarding sleep patterns. Your sleep usually becomes lighter. That makes it easier for something to wake you up and more difficult to get back to sleep. At the same time, you need more sleep. All those functions that take place during sleep take longer.

Nobody's bladder works as well when they get older and for guys, this is doubly so. (Hello prostate!) So there's another source of waking up in the middle of the night.

Things like having the right firmness of bed and the correct pillow thickness become more important or you wake up with a crick in your neck or a pain in your back that might take days to go away. You may need some padding between your knees or a pillow to support your belly.

Older people are more prone to sleep apnea. (So far I have missed out on that but my wife hasn't.) I cannot sleep in the presence of certain sounds. (White noise is fine.) Snoring is right at the top of the list and drives me insane. Took me literally decades to convince my wife she'd started snoring and snorting and choking and then she finally did a sleep study to prove me wrong. Now she has a C-PAP.

I need 9-10 hours of sleep a night. I know I can wake up after 6 hours of sleep and feel wide awake. I know for an absolute fact that in an hour or two after that I will desperately need to go back to sleep for a few hours. I also know that if I take a mid-day nap, I will not fall asleep at a reasonable time in the evening.

Caffeine may accelerate my heartbeat but if I'm sleepy, I'll still go to sleep on two cups of coffee and a Monster. Drinking coffee in the early morning to stay awake is a fail. OTOH, if I drink any coffee at all in the late afternoon, I will not fall asleep at night.

The keys to getting good consistent sleep:
- Discipline regarding not doing exciting or mentally intensive things right before bedtime. (That includes screen time.)

- Discipline regarding the time of going to bed and getting up. Limit daytime naps. Shift work is problematic.

- Caffeine and stimulant discipline. Alcohol in excess can also interfere with sleep.

- Make the sleep environment as conducive to sleep as possible. (Distractions, lights, sounds, bed and pillow comfort, temperature. Standardized bedtime routine.)

- Sometimes you absolutely must sleep for a big event the next day. Melatonin can be your friend.

- If you have a sleep problem, it could be sleep apnea, depression, non-24, or some other medical issue. Have it checked out. (Google doesn't count.)

- Accepting that sometimes you just won't get enough sleep. Getting angry because you woke up (or worse - someone woke you up) just guarantees you won't get back to sleep.

- Sometimes it is better to stay up all night than to go to bed at 4 am if you have to get up the next day.
 
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After my last huge trauma, I could only manage erratic naps when hit by a wave of exhaustion. I was satisfied if I could drive safely without nodding. Eventually, I discovered that it took another hour or two of sleep each day to feel any joy in life. I realize that all the most significant days of my career don't feel memorable because I was not well rested for them.
 
Not sure if I’m the only one experiencing this or not sure if this is being caused by autism. Fact if I can’t sleep, nor do I have a strong desire to do so

I tried a lot of methods, none worked. I mean some worked temporarily but it wasn’t long before I reverted back to my old habits

Anyways I don’t like sleeping and tend to stay up late, and never waking up in the morning
 
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