Monday, 22 May 2006, 4:16 AM
Hmm, 34 visitors, 165 pageviews, not one comment. Think I have stunned everyone into silence.
I know, ‘it’s not about the stats…’
Am trying to be positive and ‘embrace’ my insomnia. I have emptied the dishwasher, sorted out the washing, oiled the kitchen work surface. Maybe I can turn into an obsessive cleaner in the wee small hours, kill two birds with one stone.
I can see that conceptualising and naming something as a Problem will turn it into one. But on the other hand, how am I to consider my attitudes and feelings about life? Should I just ignore them and hope they’ll go away, pretend they don’t exist and that I’m perfectly happy and that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds?
Am I over-dramatising my insomnia, my poor self image, and my unhappiness? Am I turning myself into a victim? I have been told that before: ‘You’re not a victim, but you act as though you are’. But isn’t that a ‘Problem’ in itself? Given that that is how I feel and how I have always felt, isn’t it a good thing that I’m acknowledging it and trying to find ways to change it?
Do I have a Real Problem that I need to do something about, or don’t I? Obviously, it is all about what goes on in my head, but how can you change that? Not by just wishing it to be so. Maybe by taking drugs, though they have never helped me in the past. And somehow, that seems like a cop-out, not a real solution.
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Embracing insomnia
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Why not just by wishing it so? At the moment you are suffering from negative thoughts, why wouldn't thinking positive thoughts have some effect?
 | husbandorcat [Member] 2006-05-22 @ 17:30 |
Believe me, if 'wishing could make things so', things would have changed a long, long time ago.
Maybe positive thoughts could have an effect.
They never have in the past, but hey, what is 50 years of experience worth by comparison with wishful thinking???
 | LadyLucy [Member] 2006-05-22 @ 14:58 |
Isn't that what most people do, think that all's for the best in the best of all worlds? There is so much out there we cannot change, it's not worth trying so why allow ourselves to dwell on the negative?
| LadyLucy [Member] 2006-05-22 @ 18:25 |
As both are thought processes, don't see why one should be more or less effective than the other one, unless you let it be so.
well, i'm happy to admit that i now take tablets to help me sleep, after years of a similar sleep pattern to yours which left me exhausted, stressed, depressed...
i realise that tablets don't get to the root cause, and (i believe) also don't provide the same kind of really deep, quality sleep that we yearn for. but. i sleep enough now to have reclaimed a modicum of my sanity (troll musings apart). and that is sufficient.
it's easy for your body to get into a whole different routine with sleep. so you find yourself waking up at 2 a.m. each night (as i did). i'd get up, watch TV, drink hot chocolate - have several hours of this weird, midnight existence, which felt oddly clandestine, and then, utterly dull with tiredness i'd fall into bed for a couple of hours sleep before having to drag myself out of bed to go to work.
the one drawback, i'd say, with tablets is that they can leave feeling tired in the morning. but i'm no longer awake in the middle of the night. i use the tablets for periods when i need them: and then reduce and gradually stop them when my life is generally more chilled.
but if tablets are not for you then i've heard that you need to train your body into a different sleep pattern, which means that if you wake up you stay up until you feel tired again, but that you set your alarm clock for say 7 a.m. (irrespective of the time you fell asleep again). so you make yourself get up at a set time no matter how tired this may intially make you feel. it takes time, but the idea is is that you will be sufficiently tired after a week or so of this to start to sleep through the night again.
all best wishes,
trolly x
| husbandorcat [Member] 2006-05-29 @ 09:22 |
Thanks for that. It is good to know that someone else has been there and managed to find a way back.
the conventional sleeping tablets (valium, temazepam etc etc etc) have absoultely no effect on me - neither do the herbal ones from the health shop, which I have also tried. I was prescribed antidepressants a few years back, but they never seemed to work either, and my GP's response was always: 'take more of them!' In the end I realised that that wasn't the solution.
I have tried the getting up and doing stuff in the middle of the night approach, but the problem with the 'stay up until you feel tired again' is that I never actually stop feeling tired - so it is hard to judge the right time to go back to bed. What tends to happen is that I stay up doing stuff for a couple of hours, then go back to bed and STILL lie there for another couple of hours. My alarm clock is my husband, I have asked him to make sure he doesn't let me sleep beyond 7:30 on weekdays, he usually leaves me till about 8:30 at weekends, but I rarely sleep beyond then.
I'll keep you posted about what they say at the clinic.
Thanks again,
Bel/Mel
i really feel for you, and hope all goes well at the sleep clinic.
it's going to take some major changes in my life (work-wise) before i could contemplate throwing away the tablets i take to get my brain to switch off at the end of the day. until then...
what a crazy life. really.
trolly x
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2006-05-22 @ 14:56