I've had insomnia for decades. It would take me 1-2 hrs to fall asleep, then I'd wake up around 3-4am and watch the clock slowly tick by to my 6am wake up, or if I was lucky, nearly so and get 10-15 minutes sleep right beforehand. I was always sleep deprived and could sleep in well past noon on weekends at times, the only thing that enabled me to keep going.
Over the past few years I've slowly found a number of things that have improved my sleep considerably, to the extent that I am getting a good 6-7 hours a night! It's bliss, and I love it! I still wake up around 3-4am, but only for 10 minutes or so rather than that being the end of the sleep.
But now I'm getting flack for doing these things - I don't think it's too much. I meditate for 15 minutes sometime after I put DD to bed, I wear blue-light blocking glasses for 2 hours before my bedtime, and I have a warm bath right before I go to sleep. If I don't some of these, my sleep is worse, although it usually takes several days of doing none of them to return to my previous insomniac pattern. But I can tell specific things, like if I don't wear the glasses I tend to take much longer to fall asleep, etc.
But DH says that I have an 'excessive routine' and am 'obsessed' about making sure I do these things (I do like to do them, it helps me sleep! I like sleep!). He says I'm getting 'dependent' on them - but I don't understand how I can be getting dependent on something when they improved my quality of life and all removing them does is let my quality of life drift (slowly) back to what it was before.
AIBU?
To think that if I've found stuff that helps me sleep, doing them is not being 'obsessed' and 'dependent'?
murmuration · 05/12/2015 12:29
formerly, yes, although it seems it more because he doesn't see the point - for example, I try to clean the house every week, one day for kitchen, one day for sitting room, etc. This is hard for me due to my CFS/ME, and he sees this and says, "Don't clean if you feel bad." This is how he deals with his fatigue. But the problem is that I might feel bad, but I can spend 20 minutes cleaning the kitchen that day with a only a small struggle. If I wait a week, I can't manage the now 35 minutes it would take to get two weeks of grime away. I know this, and so avoid getting to a state where I need to make myself sick to clean things, I just do little bits. (He's much worse than me, so can't do the cleaning, although he does help with hoovering when he has a bit of energy; he's meant be hiring a cleaner but there are a lot of other things on his list of things to do and I actually do like cleaning so have stopped bugging him about it). Anyway, I get the feeling he is frustrated with me for making myself feel a tiny bit bad now to avoid feeling really bad in the future. He never does that -- but when he feels really bad he can just lie down, I have to pace myself so I can go to work!
rain, perhaps there is something to that, although the major problems seem to be we never feel well at the same time. We actually gotten into a fair fequency (given we have a 3yo), but then he got depressed about Paris and hasn't been interested since :( I do interact, but I don't want to sit down and discuss in depth a bunch of things, which is what he seems to want to do. I'm now trying harder to get him to open up before I get in the bath, and we have had some discussions.
I did used to take sleeping pills, and it took forever to find something that worked. I needed perscription ones, and the only that worked was highly addictive. Since I'm off that, which was quite hard (that was a good 15 years ago now), I don't want to go back.
shiny - it's really hard, isn't it. The glasses and meditation have helped me most -- and I took a lot of advice from the 'Sleep' pack in Headspace about tiny things in the rest of my day, which was helpful.
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