Insomnia
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All my life until a few years ago. Even went to a sleep clinic a few years back but learned nothing that I hadn't already read on the net. Avoid bright lights a few hours before bedtime, go to bed at the same time every night, etc. Have you tried Melatonin? It's over the counter and aside from enhanced dreaming it seems to work quite well without the hangover of sleeping pills.
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- Rambeau
Me too, for years...fricking sucks
Flipper_336
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- Carl
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I haven't used melotonin but have used valarian root, which at times works wonders...other times not at all.
I can months with getting great nights sleep...then all of a sudden I'll get an hour or two a night for weeks at a time. Sometimes working out around 6pm will ensure I am asleep by 10pm...other times does nothing.
I've learned to deal with it for the most part...every once in a while though it makes for a rough day.
I can months with getting great nights sleep...then all of a sudden I'll get an hour or two a night for weeks at a time. Sometimes working out around 6pm will ensure I am asleep by 10pm...other times does nothing.
I've learned to deal with it for the most part...every once in a while though it makes for a rough day.
fearsomefour
Legend
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I have struggled with this in various forms. For awhile in college in San Diego I would go a couple of days without sleeping. As I've gotten older I sleep every night but usually not till 2 or 3 am.
The best results I have gotten have been from losing weight and eating really healthy.
The best results I have gotten have been from losing weight and eating really healthy.
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I definitely benefitted from losing weight, eating right, and exercising. I used to get terrible sleep when I was 300+.
Exercising does usually help...still have issues at times though. I've gotten some good sleep the past few nights. My fiancee is going on her bachelorette party this weekend, which means I get the bed to myself...probably sleep like a baby.
Thordaddy
Binding you with ancient logic
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Don't know much about you so hope this isn't offensive,but I'm a Catholic and I keep a rosary next to my bed ,if I have trouble sleeping ,I pray a rosary,it works pretty well to clear the mind and I often fall asleep with it in my hand half way through.
Clearing your mind is the best way IMO to defeat insomnia.
Clearing your mind is the best way IMO to defeat insomnia.
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http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783
The myth of the eight-hour sleep
By Stephanie Hegarty/BBC World Service
We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.
It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.
Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists.
In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.
Much like the experience of Wehr's subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.
"It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says.
During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.
And these hours weren't entirely solitary - people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex.
A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when "they have more enjoyment" and "do it better".
Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.
By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness.
He attributes the initial shift to improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses - which were sometimes open all night. As the night became a place for legitimate activity and as that activity increased, the length of time people could dedicate to rest dwindled.
When segmented sleep was the norm
In his new book, Evening's Empire, historian Craig Koslofsky puts forward an account of how this happened.
"Associations with night before the 17th Century were not good," he says. The night was a place populated by people of disrepute - criminals, prostitutes and drunks.
"Even the wealthy, who could afford candlelight, had better things to spend their money on. There was no prestige or social value associated with staying up all night."
That changed in the wake of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation. Protestants and Catholics became accustomed to holding secret services at night, during periods of persecution. If earlier the night had belonged to reprobates, now respectable people became accustomed to exploiting the hours of darkness.
This trend migrated to the social sphere too, but only for those who could afford to live by candlelight. With the advent of street lighting, however, socialising at night began to filter down through the classes.
In 1667, Paris became the first city in the world to light its streets, using wax candles in glass lamps. It was followed by Lille in the same year and Amsterdam two years later, where a much more efficient oil-powered lamp was developed.
London didn't join their ranks until 1684 but by the end of the century, more than 50 of Europe's major towns and cities were lit at night.
Night became fashionable and spending hours lying in bed was considered a waste of time.
"People were becoming increasingly time-conscious and sensitive to efficiency, certainly before the 19th Century," says Roger Ekirch. "But the industrial revolution intensified that attitude by leaps and bounds."
Strong evidence of this shifting attitude is contained in a medical journal from 1829 which urged parents to force their children out of a pattern of first and second sleep.
"If no disease or accident there intervene, they will need no further repose than that obtained in their first sleep, which custom will have caused to terminate by itself just at the usual hour.
"And then, if they turn upon their ear to take a second nap, they will be taught to look upon it as an intemperance not at all redounding to their credit."
Stages of sleep
Every 60-100 minutes we go through a cycle of four stages of sleep
Source: Gregg Jacobs
Today, most people seem to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour sleep, but Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body's natural preference for segmented sleep as well as the ubiquity of artificial light.
This could be the root of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia, where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep, he suggests.
The condition first appears in literature at the end of the 19th Century, at the same time as accounts of segmented sleep disappear.
"For most of evolution we slept a certain way," says sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs. "Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology."
The idea that we must sleep in a consolidated block could be damaging, he says, if it makes people who wake up at night anxious, as this anxiety can itself prohibit sleeps and is likely to seep into waking life too.
Russell Foster, a professor of circadian [body clock] neuroscience at Oxford, shares this point of view.
"Many people wake up at night and panic," he says. "I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern."
But the majority of doctors still fail to acknowledge that a consolidated eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
"Over 30% of the medical problems that doctors are faced with stem directly or indirectly from sleep. But sleep has been ignored in medical training and there are very few centres where sleep is studied," he says.
Jacobs suggests that the waking period between sleeps, when people were forced into periods of rest and relaxation, could have played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally.
In many historic accounts, Ekirch found that people used the time to meditate on their dreams.
"Today we spend less time doing those things," says Dr Jacobs. "It's not a coincidence that, in modern life, the number of people who report anxiety, stress, depression, alcoholism and drug abuse has gone up."
So the next time you wake up in the middle of the night, think of your pre-industrial ancestors and relax. Lying awake could be good for you.
-----------------------
http://www.remmedical.com/insomnia/famous-people-with-insomnia.php
Famous People With Insomnia
Would it surprise you to know that some of the world’s most famous presidents, actors, philosophers, writers, and politicians were insomniacs? Many of the world’s most intelligent people were insomniacs. Being such a great thinker can keep you up at night. You’re definitely in good company if you suffer from insomnia, and many of them were in the world of show business. Despite their insomnia, or perhaps because of it, they were successful.
These people thought quite a lot. Americans don’t get enough sleep according to a fresh survey, but not getting enough sleep is nothing new to even the most successful Americans. There are some notable insomniacs throughout history that have made history. Some of these insomniacs actually cured themselves through their ingenuity.
Marilyn Monroe was a troubled star in Hollywood that was a habitual insomniac. She tried to take sleeping pills to cure her ills, but nothing worked. Over several years, her insomnia kept getting worse until the time of her death, and the cause of it was an overdose of sleeping pills. The day before she died of an overdose, she was extremely enraged when she heard that a friend had gotten 15 hours of sleep.
Vincent Van Gogh tried to treat his insomnia on his own. His cure was to use a heavy dose of camphor that was applied liberally to his mattress and pillow, and even though this helped him sleep, it was slowly poisoning him too. Camphor is closely connected to the chemical turpentine. Many experts believe that it was a component that pushed him to an early suicide.
Napolean Bonaparte created a whole empire even though he just slept in two-hour stints. He was called the ‘Little Emperor’, and he had such terrible suffering from insomnia, that he could he barely sleep for more than four hours a night, and he just had to grow accustomed to his condition.
Judy Garland was extremely addicted to diet pills, which were just like amphetamines from a very early age. She would sometimes be awake for days on end. To deal with the effects of the speed, she would try out sleeping pills, and this was a dangerous combination that would eventually lead to her death.
Margaret Thatcher was the British prime minister, and she said she only need four hours of sleep per night. Some are suggesting that her motto of “sleep is for wimps” is just a cover-up for insomnia, a disease that could have been seen as a weakness in a leader.
Groucho Marx had some terrible insomnia, and it was triggered the week of the stock market crash in 1929, after he had lost a fortune. To reduce the symptoms of his insomnia, he would call up strangers in the middle of the night and insult them. That is not a good recommendation to try. Remember, that in today’s time, we have caller ID.
Madonna close sources say that she uses medication to treat her sleeping problems, and that she has an extreme desire for fame and fortune too. She doesn’t disagree with this statement. She says she is anal, is a workaholic, has insomnia, and is a control freak. She said that’s one of the reasons she’s not married, because she says that no one can stand her.
Benjamin Franklin had problems with insomnia, despite waking up early in the morning. He would need to get up and air out his bed to get the fresh oxygen coming in. He went so far as to have two beds so that he could get up from one in the middle of the night and move to another if he couldn’t air it out.
Cary Grant suffered from insomnia as well. He said he would wake up at 3 AM, read for an hour, go back to bed, and wake up at 6:30 AM, and then maybe fully get up at 7.
Charles Dickens definitely had some insomnia. He would stroll the streets of London at night.
Thomas Edison had some insomnia too. He would only sleep for a few hours at a time. He just couldn’t stop creating. He was a busy thinker.
Marcel Proust was a famous author that serious insomnia.
Arianna Huffington is a professional writer and commentator on The Huffington Post, and she has garnered a lot of fame as a workaholic as well as an insomniac, but when she passed out from being exhausted, broke her cheekbone, and got five stitches above her eye, she has been a tireless crusader against the disease of insomnia. She calls insomnia a “feminist issue”, and she encourages women to get plenty of sleep each night.
Bill Clinton has said that he only gets five hours of sleep per night, but he tried to extend that number after he had a heart attack that he partly blamed on fatigue. He says that every mistake he made in his life, he made because he was way too tired to operate cogently.
Abraham Lincoln suffered from insomnia for a very long time, and he was known for his midnight strolls.
Tallulah Bankhead was an actress that hired homosexuals to hold her hand while she went to sleep.
Marlene Dietrich was an actress, and used a sardine sandwich to cure her insomnia. No one is really sure why this worked, or if it was just psychological or somatic. It could have worked because the sweet bread released the tryptophan in the meat, which his a brain chemical that is a potent sleep aid.
Amy Lowell was a poet, and she couldn’t sleep without pure quiet. She would rent a hotel room, and she would also rent the rooms on top, underneath, on the left side, and the right side of her.
W.C. Fields was a famous actor, and he could only fall asleep under an umbrella that would get watered by a sprinkler hose. Perhaps it was the white noise that he liked. He would be happy to know that he could buy white noise devices now in this day and age.
Alexandre Dumas was an author, and he wrote several famous novels. He would relieve his insomnia by taking strolls late at night.
Franz Kafka was a famous author, and he had a journal where he wrote of his worst suffering. He wrote one night that he could not fall asleep for three straight nights, and that he slept soundly, but after about an hour of sleeping, he would wake up, and it was as if he had put his head in a bad place.
Theodore Roosevelt was a U.S. president, and he would take a glass of cognac with a glass of milk before bed. The tryptophan in the milk might have been released by the sweet cognac. Tryptophan is a potent sleep aid because it’s an amino acid that creates serotonin which creates melatonin, and melatonin helps put us to sleep.
Mark Twain was an author who one time tossed a pillow at a bedroom window of one of his friend’s houses he was staying in. When the glass shattering let in some cool air, he went to sleep right away. When he woke up in the morning, he discovered that he had just shattered a glass bookcase.
There have been many great people throughout history with insomnia. Don’t feel bad if you have it. You’re in great company.
The myth of the eight-hour sleep
By Stephanie Hegarty/BBC World Service
We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.
It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.
Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists.
In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.
Much like the experience of Wehr's subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.
"It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says.
During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.
And these hours weren't entirely solitary - people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex.
A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when "they have more enjoyment" and "do it better".
Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.
By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness.
He attributes the initial shift to improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses - which were sometimes open all night. As the night became a place for legitimate activity and as that activity increased, the length of time people could dedicate to rest dwindled.
When segmented sleep was the norm
- "He knew this, even in the horror with which he started from his first sleep, and threw up the window to dispel it by the presence of some object, beyond the room, which had not been, as it were, the witness of his dream." Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1840)
- "Don Quixote followed nature, and being satisfied with his first sleep, did not solicit more. As for Sancho, he never wanted a second, for the first lasted him from night to morning." Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote (1615)
- "And at the wakening of your first sleepe You shall have a hott drinke made, And at the wakening of your next sleepe Your sorrowes will have a slake." Early English ballad, Old Robin of Portingale
- The Tiv tribe in Nigeria employ the terms "first sleep" and "second sleep" to refer to specific periods of the night
In his new book, Evening's Empire, historian Craig Koslofsky puts forward an account of how this happened.
"Associations with night before the 17th Century were not good," he says. The night was a place populated by people of disrepute - criminals, prostitutes and drunks.
"Even the wealthy, who could afford candlelight, had better things to spend their money on. There was no prestige or social value associated with staying up all night."
That changed in the wake of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation. Protestants and Catholics became accustomed to holding secret services at night, during periods of persecution. If earlier the night had belonged to reprobates, now respectable people became accustomed to exploiting the hours of darkness.
This trend migrated to the social sphere too, but only for those who could afford to live by candlelight. With the advent of street lighting, however, socialising at night began to filter down through the classes.
In 1667, Paris became the first city in the world to light its streets, using wax candles in glass lamps. It was followed by Lille in the same year and Amsterdam two years later, where a much more efficient oil-powered lamp was developed.
London didn't join their ranks until 1684 but by the end of the century, more than 50 of Europe's major towns and cities were lit at night.
Night became fashionable and spending hours lying in bed was considered a waste of time.
"People were becoming increasingly time-conscious and sensitive to efficiency, certainly before the 19th Century," says Roger Ekirch. "But the industrial revolution intensified that attitude by leaps and bounds."
Strong evidence of this shifting attitude is contained in a medical journal from 1829 which urged parents to force their children out of a pattern of first and second sleep.
"If no disease or accident there intervene, they will need no further repose than that obtained in their first sleep, which custom will have caused to terminate by itself just at the usual hour.
"And then, if they turn upon their ear to take a second nap, they will be taught to look upon it as an intemperance not at all redounding to their credit."
Stages of sleep
Every 60-100 minutes we go through a cycle of four stages of sleep
- Stage 1 is a drowsy, relaxed state between being awake and sleeping - breathing slows, muscles relax, heart rate drops
- Stage 2 is slightly deeper sleep - you may feel awake and this means that, on many nights, you may be asleep and not know it
- Stage 3 and Stage 4, or Deep Sleep - it is very hard to wake up from Deep Sleep because this is when there is the lowest amount of activity in your body
- After Deep Sleep, we go back to Stage 2 for a few minutes, and then enter Dream Sleep - also called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep - which, as its name suggests, is when you dream
Source: Gregg Jacobs
Today, most people seem to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour sleep, but Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body's natural preference for segmented sleep as well as the ubiquity of artificial light.
This could be the root of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia, where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep, he suggests.
The condition first appears in literature at the end of the 19th Century, at the same time as accounts of segmented sleep disappear.
"For most of evolution we slept a certain way," says sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs. "Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology."
The idea that we must sleep in a consolidated block could be damaging, he says, if it makes people who wake up at night anxious, as this anxiety can itself prohibit sleeps and is likely to seep into waking life too.
Russell Foster, a professor of circadian [body clock] neuroscience at Oxford, shares this point of view.
"Many people wake up at night and panic," he says. "I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern."
But the majority of doctors still fail to acknowledge that a consolidated eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
"Over 30% of the medical problems that doctors are faced with stem directly or indirectly from sleep. But sleep has been ignored in medical training and there are very few centres where sleep is studied," he says.
Jacobs suggests that the waking period between sleeps, when people were forced into periods of rest and relaxation, could have played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally.
In many historic accounts, Ekirch found that people used the time to meditate on their dreams.
"Today we spend less time doing those things," says Dr Jacobs. "It's not a coincidence that, in modern life, the number of people who report anxiety, stress, depression, alcoholism and drug abuse has gone up."
So the next time you wake up in the middle of the night, think of your pre-industrial ancestors and relax. Lying awake could be good for you.
-----------------------
http://www.remmedical.com/insomnia/famous-people-with-insomnia.php
Famous People With Insomnia
Would it surprise you to know that some of the world’s most famous presidents, actors, philosophers, writers, and politicians were insomniacs? Many of the world’s most intelligent people were insomniacs. Being such a great thinker can keep you up at night. You’re definitely in good company if you suffer from insomnia, and many of them were in the world of show business. Despite their insomnia, or perhaps because of it, they were successful.
These people thought quite a lot. Americans don’t get enough sleep according to a fresh survey, but not getting enough sleep is nothing new to even the most successful Americans. There are some notable insomniacs throughout history that have made history. Some of these insomniacs actually cured themselves through their ingenuity.
Marilyn Monroe was a troubled star in Hollywood that was a habitual insomniac. She tried to take sleeping pills to cure her ills, but nothing worked. Over several years, her insomnia kept getting worse until the time of her death, and the cause of it was an overdose of sleeping pills. The day before she died of an overdose, she was extremely enraged when she heard that a friend had gotten 15 hours of sleep.
Vincent Van Gogh tried to treat his insomnia on his own. His cure was to use a heavy dose of camphor that was applied liberally to his mattress and pillow, and even though this helped him sleep, it was slowly poisoning him too. Camphor is closely connected to the chemical turpentine. Many experts believe that it was a component that pushed him to an early suicide.
Napolean Bonaparte created a whole empire even though he just slept in two-hour stints. He was called the ‘Little Emperor’, and he had such terrible suffering from insomnia, that he could he barely sleep for more than four hours a night, and he just had to grow accustomed to his condition.
Judy Garland was extremely addicted to diet pills, which were just like amphetamines from a very early age. She would sometimes be awake for days on end. To deal with the effects of the speed, she would try out sleeping pills, and this was a dangerous combination that would eventually lead to her death.
Margaret Thatcher was the British prime minister, and she said she only need four hours of sleep per night. Some are suggesting that her motto of “sleep is for wimps” is just a cover-up for insomnia, a disease that could have been seen as a weakness in a leader.
Groucho Marx had some terrible insomnia, and it was triggered the week of the stock market crash in 1929, after he had lost a fortune. To reduce the symptoms of his insomnia, he would call up strangers in the middle of the night and insult them. That is not a good recommendation to try. Remember, that in today’s time, we have caller ID.
Madonna close sources say that she uses medication to treat her sleeping problems, and that she has an extreme desire for fame and fortune too. She doesn’t disagree with this statement. She says she is anal, is a workaholic, has insomnia, and is a control freak. She said that’s one of the reasons she’s not married, because she says that no one can stand her.
Benjamin Franklin had problems with insomnia, despite waking up early in the morning. He would need to get up and air out his bed to get the fresh oxygen coming in. He went so far as to have two beds so that he could get up from one in the middle of the night and move to another if he couldn’t air it out.
Cary Grant suffered from insomnia as well. He said he would wake up at 3 AM, read for an hour, go back to bed, and wake up at 6:30 AM, and then maybe fully get up at 7.
Charles Dickens definitely had some insomnia. He would stroll the streets of London at night.
Thomas Edison had some insomnia too. He would only sleep for a few hours at a time. He just couldn’t stop creating. He was a busy thinker.
Marcel Proust was a famous author that serious insomnia.
Arianna Huffington is a professional writer and commentator on The Huffington Post, and she has garnered a lot of fame as a workaholic as well as an insomniac, but when she passed out from being exhausted, broke her cheekbone, and got five stitches above her eye, she has been a tireless crusader against the disease of insomnia. She calls insomnia a “feminist issue”, and she encourages women to get plenty of sleep each night.
Bill Clinton has said that he only gets five hours of sleep per night, but he tried to extend that number after he had a heart attack that he partly blamed on fatigue. He says that every mistake he made in his life, he made because he was way too tired to operate cogently.
Abraham Lincoln suffered from insomnia for a very long time, and he was known for his midnight strolls.
Tallulah Bankhead was an actress that hired homosexuals to hold her hand while she went to sleep.
Marlene Dietrich was an actress, and used a sardine sandwich to cure her insomnia. No one is really sure why this worked, or if it was just psychological or somatic. It could have worked because the sweet bread released the tryptophan in the meat, which his a brain chemical that is a potent sleep aid.
Amy Lowell was a poet, and she couldn’t sleep without pure quiet. She would rent a hotel room, and she would also rent the rooms on top, underneath, on the left side, and the right side of her.
W.C. Fields was a famous actor, and he could only fall asleep under an umbrella that would get watered by a sprinkler hose. Perhaps it was the white noise that he liked. He would be happy to know that he could buy white noise devices now in this day and age.
Alexandre Dumas was an author, and he wrote several famous novels. He would relieve his insomnia by taking strolls late at night.
Franz Kafka was a famous author, and he had a journal where he wrote of his worst suffering. He wrote one night that he could not fall asleep for three straight nights, and that he slept soundly, but after about an hour of sleeping, he would wake up, and it was as if he had put his head in a bad place.
Theodore Roosevelt was a U.S. president, and he would take a glass of cognac with a glass of milk before bed. The tryptophan in the milk might have been released by the sweet cognac. Tryptophan is a potent sleep aid because it’s an amino acid that creates serotonin which creates melatonin, and melatonin helps put us to sleep.
Mark Twain was an author who one time tossed a pillow at a bedroom window of one of his friend’s houses he was staying in. When the glass shattering let in some cool air, he went to sleep right away. When he woke up in the morning, he discovered that he had just shattered a glass bookcase.
There have been many great people throughout history with insomnia. Don’t feel bad if you have it. You’re in great company.
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Haha..in all seriousness though I do know that my biggest problem is my mind starts racing...whether it's things I have to do the next day, worrying about debt, worrying about my family, work, etc...The worst is when you are stuck awake all night because you know you have to get some sleep!!!!Damn straight!
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Understood. I know that worrying seems to be hardwired into human beings but all my worrying never once fixed a problem or prevented it from happening. Still I fall back into it from time to time but never before falling asleep. If there's something important I have to do the next day however, it gets a lot harder to fight off those thoughts, and therefore takes longer to fall asleep. As far as I know, no one ever died from insomnia. It just makes dealing with waking life a whole lot harder.
I love this quote from the movie The 13th Warrior. Antonio Banderas and his Viking pals are getting ready to go into battle. Some of them decide to sleep first. Banderas asks one of them how they can sleep at a time like this? He says, "The All-Father wove the skein of your life a long time ago. Go and hide in a hole if you wish, but you won't live one instant longer. Your fate is fixed. Fear profits a man nothing."
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I concur. I keep it on hand and use it occasionally. Its natural and like you said, it doesn't give you that hangover in the morning like sleeping pills do. Diphenhydramine is the active ingredient in OTC sleeping pills. Hate that shit.
You can find melatonin with the vitamins in any corner drug store. I suggest 3mg to start with. Its available in 5mg and 10mg also. Its a mellow,slightly relaxing affect that helps get you into bed mode sooner. http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/tc/melatonin-overview
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- Name
- Stu
Yep. That sounds like me for the past several years.
Tron
Fights for the User
- Joined
- Jun 1, 2013
- Messages
- 7,836
- Name
- Tron
Usually go to bed late, or was at least. Anywhere from 3am-10am. Even if went to bed before 5am I'd lay in bed for 3-4 hours before being able to fall asleep for a few hours. Fixed my hours pretty good recently though, but still don't sleep through the night and many nights just sleep a few hours. Mainly just been happening because of stress from the last 6 months.
Some nights I do sleep 6-8 hours, though I usually wake up a few times and takes some time to get back to sleep. Hopefully when the stress is gone it will be better again.
Some nights I do sleep 6-8 hours, though I usually wake up a few times and takes some time to get back to sleep. Hopefully when the stress is gone it will be better again.
