I'm typing this at a ridiculous hour again. It's 4.37 am and I've been awake since 3. I decided that I might as well just get up and forget about trying to get to sleep.
I'm not sure what else I can try (except prescribed medication which I'd rather not have) . I have tried relaxation and breathing techniques. I have tried natural remedies including Kalms which don't appear to have any effect at all on me. I have taken Sominex 1 a night which help a bit but which give me very, very vivid dreams and I usually wake in fright or fear, covered in sweat at an ungodly hour so it would seem that Sominex is not for me either.
I am fond of a daytime snooze - usually in an effort to catch up on lost sleep- and I have stopped that as well in an effort to get a good nights rest but to no avail. I take regular exercise and get lots of fresh air. I don't eat a big meal before bed and if I have a bath I make sure it's not too hot.
To be honest I'm at my wits end with it but I am trying not to let it take over my life! I have read many times that lack of sleep is incredibly bad for you and your health which is a bit of a worry.
I'm not sure where this all started. I don't recall having sleep issues in my younger years although once I had children I had to be vigilant to any nighttime noise and I think that may have been where it started. Those years passed and it was on to the teenage years of my offspring and the sleepless nights that come with that - where are they? what are they doing? are they OK? why aren't they answering their phones? etc etc. So maybe it has become ingrained in me and is a habit that is almost impossible to break.
I have had sleeping pills prescribed for me on a couple of occasions, usually when I have been suffering from acute anxiety. I think I was given 5 pills each time - allegedly enough to break the cycle of lack of sleep and not enough to make you become addicted!
I also wonder how much my age has to do with it. You know, the dreaded menopause and hormones all over the place. I have had dreadful night sweats over the past few years and am currently trying medication to ease them which is also supposed to make you sleepy?! Well, I'm not sleepy and I still wake up from time to time absolutely boiling hot so obviously either those pills aren't doing their job or the menopause isn't the problem. I know insomnia can some as part of the deal with the menopause but I don't know when lack of sleep becomes insomnia.
I got an app for my iPhone the other day which monitors your sleep patterns while you are in bed and it's really interesting and very clever! It records what time you go to bed, when you are asleep and the level at which you are sleeping ( light sleep, deep sleep or awake) and at what time. It puts all of the information on a graph. It gives your overall sleep efficiency too and I'm looking forward to seeing the results over the coming weeks. After two days my sleep efficiency was 91% which is good but once today's figures are added that may be a different story.
What else has been going on? Well, I'm back to work later on today after a few weeks off. As I work in a school , today will be an inset day so I expect we will only be in for a few hours. It will be nice to see everyone again and see how their holidays were.
I have also spent the last couple of days trying to sort out the photos that are stored on my laptop. That has been a labour of love I can tell you.
I have got into the habit of uploading the photos from my iPhone to free up some memory and not actually organising the photos into folders and so on. So, many, many hours (days) later, I have got some order to my pics. All of the photos are in folders. All I have to do now is go through the folders to get rid of the rubbish shots. It is actually much easier to delete photos than it is to physically through a photo away. I am a terrible hoarder of photos and have a chest (and many, many photo albums) full of pics that I don't need and would be of no interest to anyone else. I just have to make myself sit down and go through them. But then I find photos that I haven't seen for years or find pics of Mum or Dad that set me off on another train of thought. I did start to go through the photos before we moved but it wasn't a very successful procedure to be honest.
What I did do was get a lot of my father in law's old projector slides put onto a disc and had a calendar made up for him for Christmas. He loved it! I am going to see him today and I am taking my laptop with me so that I can show him all 70 of the slides and see if it jogs his memory at all.
Here are a few of the pics I have been sorting out:
Well, it's now 5.24 am and sleep is still elusive. Unfortunately, it's too dark and too early to take the dog out for a walk. Maybe I'll have another cup of tea and then go back to bed for an hour or maybe I'll make some cakes or something. One thing is for sure, if I go back to sleep I won't want to get up when the alarm goes off at 7.15 am.
I hope you all have a lovely day and any advice re the sleeping issue would be much appreciated!
xxxxx
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