Fellow insomniacs.......I need a conflab.

[Tolkienista]

I'm 66 and I've had sleeping issues for decades.
I just live with it.
Generally I'm ok getting to sleep, it's the waking at 3 am that I have issues with.

Anyway, last night I went to bed with a million things on my mind and worries, i didn't get to sleep until probably close to 2am. Just couldn't switch off.
Then I awoke around 5.15am and haven't been able to get back to sleep.

I've just accepted it and I'm not going to beat myself up about it.
I'm not in pain, I'm warm and cosy in bed and I'll just put it behind me and move on.

So, my fellow Mumsnet insomniacs how do you deal with all the articles that tell me my health is going to be affected by my poor sleep patterns.
I'm in good health. Haven't been to a doctor for years. I eat well, exercise regularly, I'm fit/active and a size 10.
But insomnia is an issue & I do have concerns about it long term.
However, my mum is 96 and she has exactly the same experience as me with sleep and like me has had it for decades.

Please share your experience.
I'm all ears!

This! This was my turning point in my struggles with insomnia. Accepting and befriending wakefulness.

I might add—All the sleep hygiene tips are basically useless for proper insomnia. They are mainly to help someone who doesn’t have insomnia get a better quality of sleep.

Sleep aids too are often doing more harm than help if the root cause is psychological.

I highly HIGHLY recommend watching the Sleep Coach on YouTube. He really reframes the narrative about sleep. I did some lessons with them and it was life-changing.

I’m slightly cynical about ‘befriending and accepting wakefulness’ and sleep CBT. I don’t really care about being awake at night. It’s the feeling absolutely awful the next day that is difficult - I don’t just feel sleepy the next day, I feel nauseous, exhausted and end up eating a lot to try and get through the day. I’m not someone that finds it easy to nap, it just doesn’t happen even if I lie down (and I’m at work anyway).

Does the ‘accepting’ of the insomnia actually help people to sleep better, or just accept the situation?

A bit of an aside, but I once taught a student who told me he had trained himself to have a number of 100 minute "bursts" of sleep throughout 24 hours. He had measured his biorhythms and calculated the length of one sleep cycle, which he said refreshed him and then he could work for a bit, have another sleep cycle etc. It all sounded a bit punitive and impractical for someone who wasn't a student. He told me that he didn't feel tired unless he woke up in the middle of a sleep cycle.

Paradoxically accepting and being ok with being awake at night helps your body recognise that being awake is not a threat, therefore sleep comes.

I find it hard to explain, but it’s really simple when the guy from Sleep Coach school does.

I'm mid 50s, sleep was a problem since childhood. I sleep walked until 14, once my periods started I then started getting night sweats too. I have always been a light sleeper, so if ever I got an hour or two of sleep and was woken that would be it for me until the next night. I'm quite a laid back person and tend not to have worries - sometimes there are big life events of course, but in between those times I feel balanced, so the CBT and hygiene, etc., didn't help. I take phenergen and similar and listen to audiobooks - I find someone who's reading voice I like and then I leave it to play all night so that if I wake up I can focus on that and then go back to sleep. And I'm like a child, I listen to the same story nightly for months. If I don't take the antihistamine and audiobook, then I lie there bored and start thinking about how I can redesign the house and garden, or how I could decorate someone else's home or start making up stories, but I don't fall asleep doing this, listening to a story is less active on my part than creating one. I tried melatonin but couldn't see a positive effect. I take magnesium, I think it helps, but I'm not sure.

I've never become stressed about insomnia, but thankfully the darkest days seem to be a thing of the past. In my 20's and 30s I regularly had to function on 2 to 3 hours a night for weeks and months on end. My 40's were all over the place. Now in my 50s I can pretty reliably get 5 to 7 hours, and I sleep a little more soundly - so I blame hormones for mine, but I'm also ND, and I also suspect this plays a role in it all.

I’m so glad someone is calling out the ‘sleep hygiene’ concept. I don’t doubt that it might help ‘normal’ sleepers who have temporarily slipped into bad habits, but IME it doesn’t make much difference to those of us with genuine insomnia/ sleep disorders. I’m convinced the sleep hygiene concept is mostly a ruse concocted by the medical profession to put the blame back on the patient because they don’t have many answers.

I decided a year ago to try amitriptaline. One pill in evening. I'm sleeping again

I'm your age. Its not what the experts recommend but it works for me after 20 years of insomnia: I record really gentle, not very interesting programmes, which are just interesting enough to catch my attention/stop the mind whirling. Old detective programmes like Wycliffe, Vera, Lewis or Law n Order work well. So I go to the spare room, telly on, snuggle down and watch a programme for an hour. I then put on recordings of Tipping Point, the daytime quiz, very quietly. I usually fall asleep half way through the first episode. . . (Escape to the Country used to work well too)
HTH

Exactly this. It gives me rage.

I have had insomnia for decades. Recently bought a snoozeband after years of trying so many different things and it actually works. It has white noise and Bluetooth

https://www.snoozeband.co.uk/?gadsource=1&gbraid=0AAAAABJBFimgye4kHrep4HaxVGUuOUEK&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI6v-omyjAMVSpNQBh3G5A9BEAAYASAAEgKbgvDBwE

I have also signed up to slumber and I never actually get to hear a whole story! That is great but also I want to hear it right through 😆

https://slumberstudios.com

Do they stop working with long term use. They work amazing for me, but afraid to take every night incase stop working.

Haha....... me too.
I had a pretty good night's sleep.
Went to bed without the worries I'd had the night before ✓
Went to bed without a shed load of caffeine inside me from multiple cups of tea✓
Went to bed thinking I'm resting, I'm cosy, I'm not on my own struggling with insomnia ✓
Ended up having a good night's sleep, well better than the night before.

@ButtCheeks definitely going to look into this, sounds really interesting.

My fiancé is having trouble sleeping due to work stress, he sometimes couldn’t get to sleep until 6am then he would wake every hour. He started taking magnesium tablets a couple of weeks ago and they are really helping. He still can’t get to sleep until 2am but once he is asleep he sleeps solidly and is gradually waking up earlier and getting to sleep earlier.

I take an antihistamine when struggling and it helps me to sleep a lot

I’m glad antihistamines work for some folks but may I add a warning - if you’re menopausal and experiencing any vaginal dryness the antihistamine will dry all your mucous membranes (that’s its job!) and that will NOT help any dry/itch cycle which will then keep you awake 😠

@MagentaRocks I’ve been looking at these and wondering if they are worth buying. Can I ask which one you bought and do you keep it on all night? Thanks

I started with the snoozeband deluxe then upgraded to the snoozeband max. I find the max better as it has eye cups which I find more comfortable. They do stay on over night. You can set them to turn off after and hour or 2 as well.

I talked at my rheumatology appointment about taking antihistamines for sleep. I have fibromyalgia and poor sleep as part of this.
I take piriton on days when I have to get up and drive early the next morning and Kirkland sleep aid ( half tablet) on days I don't as I think it makes me more groggy first thing. I also take melatonin.
I told the consultant physiotherapist I see that I was concerned about taking antihistamines for sleep because of their correlation with increased chance of dementia.
He just shrugged and said, but poor sleep is also correlated with a higher risk of dementia.

It kind of put my mind at rest about taking the antihistamine.

So I take various permutations and combinations of different things on different nights. I do want to be a bit "cleaner" about what I take and reduce doses but I have been going through a perfect storm of difficult circumstances for the last few months and it hasn't felt like the right time to tackle it.

I need to start on this though. I think my first step is to get a bit more exercise, so at least walk round the block on days when I'm not doing anything else physical.

@MagentaRocks Thats great, thank you

Early menopause and have been an insomniac ever since. Totally agree with the sleep when you are tired philosophy but with working full time not an option!