Welcome to everybody’s hated game show: The Insomnia Show! Filled with all kinds of interesting things like watching infomercials on TV and reading up on disturbing stuff on Google! Stay up all night and be tired all day! This has been the story of my life for quite some time, and it’s not necessarily a very interesting one. Heading into the SADD season and coupled with my rampant ADD and Anxiety it’s all just a big old party in my messed up little head.
Oh don’t get me wrong, Insomnia CAN be interesting. I have a fellow blogger who even put it in the name of her blog. Go check out the Insomniac’s Dream sometime. She is one cool lady.
The other day I drove to the town that my husband works in, daughter in tow. I went to get my eyes checked for new glasses and then got to go out to lunch with my husband and his boss. Somehow we got onto the subject of insomnia and I interjected that I had not had an unmedicated night’s sleep in years. It’s not something I’m proud of.
I’ve tried a lot of different things and some things work for awhile, other things don’t work at all. Not drinking caffeine (HA HA-right), valerian root (which to me sounds sexual and I don’t know why), soothing tea, wine (my personal favorite), melatonin (which sounds too much like melanoma), and Ambien. Not all at the same time now, I’m not nuts!
It’s not THAT bad.
Why do I not sleep? There are soooo many reasons. A lot of it is a combination of ADD and Anxiety. All that time to lay awake and think about all of those anxious thoughts randomly for hours without interruption. My brain welcomes this opportunity and takes it and runs with it. I think some of it has to do with the fact that I am just not active enough these days. When I do go and lay in my bed without assistance from any sort of foreign substance, I do this weird half awake half asleep thing. It’s bizarre.
Back to the assistance with sleep-these days I take an Ambien most nights. When I go to bed I have a little sound machine that I turn on and sometimes I even light incense Unfortunately, it’s all for naught-sometimes it seems to not even help. Even if I take the other half I’m just up. If I do fall asleep it’s odd and only for a few minutes. This isn’t every night. Every night is different. I am thrilled to sleep seven hours, which something that can definitely be obtained on a good night.
Incidentally, did you know there are whole websites dedicated to the stuff that people do when they are on Ambien? That’s pretty freaky. I do stuff like… fall asleep at my computer after taking it. Isn’t that exciting? Oh once I typed letters that did not form words. Call the police, that’s pretty racy stuff.
Falling asleep at the computer is the best I do. I’m surprised I don’t pass out somewhere like my kids have done in the past. How do they do that?
No insomnia here, just sheer princess stubborness.
These days I could just go and go and go and pray to just get tired enough to go to bed. Which is just plain weird because I’m tired all day. I wait, and I wait to get tired enough to sleep. I do stuff online. I freak myself up because I start looking up all of the symptoms that I imagine I’m having. There have been some nights I have even started seeing things I’m up so late. The other night I kept seeing something out of the corner of my eye. I finally concluded that maybe it was just my mind…
Ironically, I suppose I could take an antihistamine or a Xanax and sleep for DAYS. As wonderful as that sounds, I think there’d be some people upset with me.
For now, I take my half Ambien, and if the stuff is not cooperating then I take the other half. Most nights some combination of this works in some way. The ones that don’t, well, aren’t good nights.
I’m hoping that once we can get our finances better understood and where we were going to be at, then I could try a different method to help me sleep. Some different herbs, burn that incense, maybe even a massage. That would be a nice night.
Do you suffer from insomnia? Any weird stories to share?
She just couldn’t fight it anymore…
The Sadder But Wiser Girl 