OT insomnia

[colomom]

Wondering what tips and tricks you all can recommend to battle the insomnia beast.

I’m sure we all have different factors that contribute to insomnia. Things that contribute to my insomnia include back pain, allergies, and life stresses. For my back pain I use a TENS unit and heat. I take a number of allergy meds to try to clear my nose. To settle my mind I listen to something while falling asleep, I sometimes find the podcast Sleep With Me helps me fall asleep.

I’m guessing with the longer days of spring I’m not the only one having a harder time falling asleep. For those of you who suffer from insomnia are your tricks to tame the beast?

[robysue1]

My "tricks" include:

1) Not going to bed until I'm actually sleepy---lying in bed awake typically makes things worse for me. If I don't fall asleep in a reasonable amount of time (15 minutes or so), I have to debate whether it is better to get up and do something relaxing until I feel sleep or whether I'm sleepy enough to keep trying.

2) Trying to maintain a consistent wake up time even if I don't get to bed "on time".

[alancalan]

I had very bad back pain leading to cervical spine surgery and I slept in a recliner for I thought it was 2 months but I think it was 3 months like from October 15th to January 15th. So to kill the pain before the surgery I had painkillers and took a med pack but sleeping wasn't so easy so I asked the doctor for some sleeping pills and he gave me Zolpidem. It helped me go to sleep right away but if I don't sleep a full 8 hours, I wake up a little tired so I decided to wean myself off these pills and I'm seeing my doctor on Wednesday anyway so I'll talk to him about the best way to do it. From what I read, they say to cutting down is small intervals a week at a time.

The other thing I saw is you can take melatonin and that may help while you're on withdrawal or in your case well you can't sleep.

But what I realized also was, I was pretty active before the surgery and once I was in pain I stopped playing tennis and then came tax season so I really didn't do anything not even walking around a lot. So when I went to bed my body wasn't tired. Even though I played tennis in the morning by the time it was to get to bed I was tired and went to sleep without a problem. So this problem is new because of the Zolpidem. It does put you to sleep very quickly but you don't know what you're going to have to deal with later. At least I started on 5 mg not 10 and not extended release. But I've been on it 6 months and it's time to stop.

One more thing, be careful of the allergy pills you take because some of them might have a decongestant that keeps you up. I know whenever I had a bad cold I would take NyQuil and I go to sleep very quickly. But really for me the most important thing is exercise.

One more thing, you can listen to books. If you are alone just do it on your phone and if you're living with somebody get wireless headphones on Amazon you can probably get them for $25-$40 and they're pretty good. I used to listen to Stuart Woods Stone Barrington books that series and you really get into the characters and you feel comfortable when you listen to it but they're not the kind of books that keep you up waiting to see what's going to happen because from one book to another there's a lot of similarities. I listen to about 65 in that series and then maybe we're another 10 in the spin-off series and then I listened to his first five books and those were actually the best books that he wrote. When you wake up in the morning you can generally find where you left off. Most of your local libraries have millions of books that you can download. Believe me it's much better than putting the TV on because that will keep you up.

[Miss Emerita]

Before CPAP I loved reading in bed right before going to sleep, but I've taken to heart all the professional advice about using the bed only for sleep and sex. So now it's lights out once I get hooked up to the machine. I think this really made a difference. I've also been more careful about not using screens for about an hour before bed-time.

If I can remember part of a dream from some previous night, remembering it "from the inside" often helps me to drop off. Maybe that's just me.