Sleep; Ways to avoid or get more of it

Insomnia; the word sounds so gentle, its almost tactile its so soft. Its the devil in disguise, the sun rising while you are still waiting to fall, the birds chirping as you are hoping for things to quieten down, the early morning radio show about cereal as you are still digesting your evening meal. The word is so inviting, it is so inviting yet its elusive. To quote the song ”I can’t sleep, somethings all over me. Greasy, insomnia please release me and let me dream about making mad love to my girl on the heath tearing off tights with my teeth. But there’s no relief I toss and turn without sleep.

“Sleep is something I have always struggled with either a lack of it or way to much of it. It has become such a novelty I play around with, conduct tests and experiments about how much sleep can I deprive myself of or how many sleeping tablets I can take while still remaining awake, how confused I can make my body clock. A symptom of depression is sleep disturbance, somehow these two separate things have come under one label. I can sleep and be depressed and I can have insomnia and depressed, I can sleep normally and be depressed, the same with mania but I have a sleep disorder and a mood disorder. They can be seen as a separate, or combined. There is something about depressed insomnia that makes it all the worse though, the wasted hours of nothingness, lying in bed looking at the ceiling and having all these hours to beat yourself up, having no one to talk to because its the middle of the night. Sleep is a great indication on my mood, when I am too far “up” I don’t need sleep its a waste of time, only foolish people get tired, and when I am “down” I desperately want sleep but cannot get it.

Sleep is something I also lie about, a lot. As it can be seen as an indicator about mood my psychiatrist usually asks about it, so I have learnt to lie. If I don’t want people to try and judge my moods I say I get between five and seven hours every night on average, its almost a ritual I have to go through every time I see my psychiatrist, however he has wised up to it and asks how much I had on specific nights, I don’t lie then, I cannot thing of sensible amounts of time quick enough. Oh how I crave to be “normal” and not to have to think about it, to take it for granted; those eight hours of rest and waking up refreshed. Whenever I tell someone that I am an insomniac they feel that they must tell me how they get to sleep. Telling me about herbs, sleep hygiene, foods to eat, dietary supplements, and rituals. I am sure it works for them but there is nothing I find worse than being told that all you need to do is X and then you will get optimum sleep levels because most probably I have tried it. I am sure that tidying your thoughts in your head works for some people or that counting to forty four times sends them to sleep but it doesn’t work for me. It gets to the point that I become so tired that I cannot follow the sleep hygiene process because I have no energy to leave my bed during the day  and then I cannot sleep at night because I have spent the whole day in bed.

Whenever I go into chemists I always manage to stumble across an expensive array of sleep aids, and then when you find one that you might like to try the person at the till kindly tells you not to take it for too long and to visit your GP. I see a psychiatrist twice a month and he is at a loss sleep wise, CAMHS refuses to prescribe me any benzos because sleep is a long term problem for me and will only give me melatonin I hope this with change when I move up to CMHT. When I started on 3mg melatonin it was like a God and about half an hour after taking it I would be asleep like a baby, then it stopped working so we went up to 6mg, then 9mg and now 12mg. Sometimes I don’t take it at all because I think it makes no difference, then I realise what wonders it does for me and I scurry back to my pills. Another game I like to play is to save them up and then take quite a few so I feel really drowsy and see how long I can stay awake for, there have been many mornings when I have woken up with my radio still blaring, my laptop knocked onto the floor and still in the clothes of the day before. When I was in hospital I took a combination of diazapam and temazepam it just seemed to depend which nurses were on shift to which I was given. Both worked but at that time they were just given to you even if you could sleep naturally. Actually most of what I did in hospital was sleep, probably because my body was repairing itself from my attempt to kill it.

I have just noticed that I haven’t focused on how to avoid sleep. Well Hannah’s top tips to avoid sleep, is to spend all your time in bed to destroy all the sleep hygiene things, to count numbers in your head in alternating foreign languages (uno, deux, drei, quattro, cinq). When you want to get out of bed early suggest that your neighbours might like to build an extension, suggest that a person you live with should listen to more heavy metal, or remove all pillows from your bed so you get neck ache. I am being silly now, sleep is a serious matter. If anyone has any half decent sleep suggestions please let me know, or failing that some spare half decent sleepers they could send to me. And how come Sims don’t have that much in the way of sleep problems, I want to be a Sim.

Last line…

So this week I am not doing an “in the limelight” post.  I know I said that I would but everything has got a little overwhelming recently. I thought that by not being in school I would have hours to look at statistics and research but my head cannot take in any numbers. I look at the screen and all I see is wiggles moving across the screen. Its not as if I have been so busy that I couldn’t write it, in fact I have become a hermit that only rises from my bed to make jelly. I have picked a topic for my next post, multi disciplinary teams, so maybe I will post it next week.