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melissaw72

melissaw72

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I have had insomnia since being a kid.  If I had the chance to sleep in in the morning back then, I'd get enough sleep; otherwise I was up until 2 or 3 AM before getting up around 6 AM for school.

 

I did have some years where I slept all night (college and a few years after), but then around 2002/2003 I started not sleeping much.  Since then I haven't been able to sleep on average more than a couple hours at a time.  That all started when I first started hallucinating.

 

A couple years ago I was diagnosed with narcolepsy.  NOT saying you might have this, just that was another factor in the sleeping mess I deal with every day.  I hope one day I can get to sleep in longer chunks more often than I do now. 

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Wooster

Wooster

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I had PTSD-related insomnia with night terrors (nocturnal panic disorder per my MD I guess) for about 8 years.

It sucked ass. For the majority of that time, I averaged less than 5 hours a night. Some nights less than 2 broken hours. Rarely, even with day time naps, more than 6 total.

I brought a sleep chart to a pdoc who, for other reasons, was already an asshole. His response was, "How do you know it's accurate?" I said that it was accurate to the best of my ability and the fact that I collected data over time increases the validity even if it's not 100% accurate. He basically said to suck it up.

I didn't stay his patient very much longer.

ETA: I feel like I should say that with proper treatment, things have gotten much better. I still go through periods of time where I don't sleep as well as I would like, and most nights I wake up between 2-3am and lay in bed listening to a book until I fall back asleep. It takes me about 10 hours to get 7 hours of sleep, but that is what my "normal" seems to be. And it's acceptable.

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kitkatt91

kitkatt91

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troubble sleeping since i was a kid, not propr insomnia yet. i had night terrors,in preschool so i stayed awake for days until i was just too tired, they went away on some day,i don't remember, maybe it was weekends i could sleep, but not the rest of the week. i think i slept normally when they stopped. it was trouble sleeping because of night terrors, i dont think it was insomnia technically.  i actually had insomnia around 6th grade, staid awake usually until about 4am every day then up at 7 for school. that never went away. i consider it better at times. waxes and wanes. when itgets better, it always comes back and gets bad again.

 

now, currently, ths got worse around january. getting worse every week. now im falling asleep at around noon every day. no medication for sleep tough. i used to take ambien and it was alright. it sucks not sleeing, im sorry :(

Edited by kitkatt91
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crtclms

crtclms

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I know it started by the time I was 7, because my dad (pdoc) was already trying to use sleep hygiene with me. It didn't work. It still doesn't work. I was usually up until 11 at night, and didn't nap, even though I really wasn't getting enough sleep for a 7 year old.

 

In my 20s, my pdoc tried to treat it with a few different things, and they either made things worse, or were like sugar pills. A few years ago, I tried Ambien, but I don't like it.

 

Now insomnia it is just part of my life. I am not working, so the worst thing to happen is I take a nap or sleep in, IF I'm tired. Big if.

 

Right now, I am depressed, so I am having trouble falling asleep, but then trouble waking up.

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moonbat

moonbat

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I've had horrible insomnia for the past 30 years. Yes, for 3/5 of my life I have been living with chronic, continual sleep deprivation and even without other symptoms from other issues that by itself would be -- and in some respects IS -- enough to drive me bats.

 

It's dwindled down from the original 0-2 hours of sleep per night (with about a 10-12-hour crashout period every 2 weeks or so) I had up until about 4 years ago, to being more along the lines of 4-5 hours per night most nights, but it's still an issue, and I'm still having those nights where I will sleep about 3 hours and get up and won't be able to sleep again -- until it's time for work of course, where I can't.  I've tried various things from OTC sleep aids to popping Benadryl to medical mj (which is legal here in California) to Valerian root, with varying degrees of random success on occasion, but nothing really works well or consistently. And if I try to re-medicate in any fashion for sleep at a 2-3 a.m. wake up, I'll be too groggy to function in the morning.  What sucks about it most is it really inhibits experiencing life to the fullest or making any useful healthy choices for yourself because you're just too . freaking . TIRED all the time.  I know getting some exercise and fixing my diet could help tremendously, but I have a long commute and don't have the time or energy for either menu-planning, shopping, proper cooking most evenings, or exercise either in the a.m. or p.m.  I'm just too wiped out. On weekends I'm so wiped out from the week and its hours that all I want to do is veg on the couch -- half the time I end up cancelling social plans as a result, which also sucks.

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moonbat

moonbat

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Now that I think about it, I probably have a long history of sleep disorders.  I never really thought about that as a symptomatic cluster till just now -- I probably should explore it with a doc.  As a child I had an intricate sleep structure of the sort they based the movie Inception upon. Speaking of which, as a child and ALL MY LIFE until that movie came out, I was the ONLY one I knew who EVER had layered sleep/dreams like that.  When I described it to others they could not relate to it at all, and I described it to MANY others on numerous occasions and asked if anyone else had ever had anything like that happen -- I never met one single person who did. Not ONE ... whereas other unusual experiences I've had, there's always been at least one or two others I've encountered in life who have had very similar things.  But not this -- UNTIL that damned movie came out and suddenly EVERYONE and his dog was claiming they'd been there and done that.  Rubbish.  It was happening to me decades ago.

 

I had bizarre nightmares from the age of 2, one recurring one involved an air-raid siren and everyone running from something.  I seemed to be older in the dream, way older, maybe even an adult, but I was running away from the whatever too, and the dream always ended the same way: I would come to a fence with some bottom drag on the ground, couldn't decide whether to try to climb it or squeeze under it to continue running, and that split second of indecision (I presume) "did me in" -- I would wake up at that point with the sure sense that whatever had been pursuing had caught me and done who knows what.  When I was about 10 I learned about the book/movie "Audrey Rose" and got fascinated with the idea the dream could have been some reincarnation thingy along those lines -- but again, I had the experience by myself, authentically, not influenced by media, though in this case, unlike with Inception, it didn't predate the media itself.

 

I had horrible nightmares as a child overall through about the age of 12 or so, though they started tapering off around age 9. Nightmares so bad I would "kill myself" in my dream to escape and make myself wake up -- that's what started the Inception-esque layering, which was at its peak at age 8-9. The first thing I'd do upon awakening would be to put on the light to re-orient myself with reality, and THAT got incorporated into this REM Hell as well. It's a wonder I didn't fall apart from sheer disorientation out of reality at that age, what with my dreams feeling so real, being layered so that "waking up" became just another part of the dream until 3 rounds of it woke me up for real, and the fact that I discovered I could escape the terror by "killing myself" in the dream ... sheeeeesh .....

 

In my early teens I started experiencing intermittent night terrors and "old hag" syndrome or sleep paralysis. Scary shit. Felt like I was "awake" but trapped in my body and my body was corpse-like and could not move. I couldn't move, scream, cry out, or anything.  These took on decidedly mythic proportions at 18-19 and were fraught with ominous overtones of a "supernatural" and "evil" caste.  Complete with full blown visual, auditory, and sensory hallucinations as well. Combined with the other things I was going through at the time, from cognitive dissonance to existential crises to the emergence of dissociative and schiz-spectrum symptoms all over the map for me, all of this pretty much overturned and upheaved my entire life at that juncture.

 

From there by my late-20s it had drifted to primarily insomnia with just the occasional random occurrence of some of those rougher experiences. I think I'd rather have hallucinations freaking me out and still get some decent sleep in the deal than be constantly wakeful and restless yet exhausted.

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brainweather

brainweather

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i hope you find something to help you sleep soon. that's a pretty bleak looking schedule. :(

 

i've had sleep disorder(s) since early childhood, although, as an infant i rarely slept too (to the point that my mother was always bring me to the dr. and dropping me off at relatives houses because i just never slept and screamed every minute i was awake). the majority of my childhood to early adolescence it was insomnia, from adolescence to now (im 22), its been a mix of hypersomnia & insomnia. never "normal" sleep patterns, even on meds. like crtclms, i have a great deal of trouble falling asleep, but once im asleep, because im so depressed i cannot get up and will sleep until even 6-7 pm sometimes.

 

my childhood insomnia issues were largely motivated by insane night terrors that ruled my life.

Edited by brainweather
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Flash

Flash

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Posted

I've had insomnia since I was a small child, but nothing like the constant sleepless nightmare of the past few years. I don't wanna jinx it, but it looks like remeron 15mg and ambien cr 12.5mg does the trick. Am looking to try lunesta before I settle on that. If I started sleeping normally, my life would be a whole lot better. Before all this, I found self hypnosis to be helpful some of the time. I started that when I was seven or eight. It was more effective when I was younger, however. Plus simply getting to sleep is only half the battle. Staying asleep can often be even more problematic.

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OffKilter

OffKilter

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Even just a few nights of really bad sleep can make you feel like crap.  I hope you can get past it. 

 

I just had an in-home sleep study done.  It showed that I have mild apnea.  Have you asked your GP about something like that? 

 

I’ve had bad sleep since I was a kid.  Stress or anxiety (real or perceived) makes it much worse.  During certain job induced stress periods, I’ll have 2 sessions of 2 hours sleep per day.  It kind of sucks.

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Crodentia

Crodentia

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I'm Bipolar 1 with PTSD, and have had insomnia for at least twelve years (since I was seventeen). I used to think it was just the caffeine I was drinking (which didn't help), but now that I've almost eliminated caffeine from my diet, I end up only needing an hour or so of sleep (if any) most nights of the week.

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