Anxiety and insomnia after childbirth

[Emilylouise1993]

Hi. I am really hoping someone can help or offer some advice. I am going out of my mind :(
I gave birth to our second little boy 3 weeks ago and I have been having a really hard time with insomnia and anxiety. I have lay awake whilst my son is fast asleep next to me wide awake ridden with anxiety and cannot sleep. I am so worried about falling to sleep and not being able to sleep that it's all I seem to think about during the day too. I have the worst anxiety from the moment I wake up through to bed time wondering how long I will lie awake for. I feel awful. I went to the doctors and they prescribed 50mg setraline- tried for 2 days and side effects were awful, tried another 2 days at 25mg and awful too. The only way I nod off is if I have a few gins before bed until little ones first feed. I am working myself up constantly about going to sleep. I have tried reading books, audio books, meditation, chamomile tea etc etc you name it I've tried it. I am scared to go back to thr GP as she didn't really listen to me the first time and I am also scared of the anti depressants not making me feel like 'me' again or being able to come off them and being reliant on them.
Has anybody had the same thing? Will this ever get better? I cannot stop feeling so sad tierd and anxious.

Bumping in the hope that someone with more expertise than me will come along. I don't have any experience but can you talk to your health visitor or a different GP? You definitely need professional help with this.

I found sertraline to be awful too. There are other anti-depressants you can try, like escitalopram, and honestly they aren't hard to come off in my experience. Especially if you're approaching them as something to help you through an acute period of anxiety - so plan on 6 months of ADs and then see where you're at.

You should carry on with all the other things you're doing while you take them (the meditation etc) and you can still contact your midwifery team and be fast tracked for postnatal anxiety counselling as well.

Just realised I don't know if you're breastfeeding, that obviously changes what you can take but I would definitely try the counselling.

On a more holistic note, your anxiety could also be exacerbated by nutritional depletion which we all have after pregnancy - you could attack it from that angle too. That will also help your hormones stabilise.

I had the same problem at 4 months post partum, not even related to babies sleep as he was sleeping well then. Totally sleepless nights, sometimes in a row. I would have surges of adrenaline just getting into bed and not even feel tired all night. I found that putting more effort into trying to sleep by trying magnesium, breathing exercises, sleep podcasts, sleep hygiene etc - all just made it worse!
I follow theinsomniaclinic on Instagram which helped considerably. She also has a CBT online course which I was going to do but my sleep had improved by then. Also subscribe to The sleepcoach on YouTube. Sertraline helped initially but didn’t address the root cause in my case. Hope it gets better for you

I also had this from birth of my little boy until he was 18 months, but I'll be honest I'm still not a great sleeper now. Things that helped me - banning my husband from telling me to have a nap or go to bed, it just made it worse, sleeping on my own so I couldn't hear any noise from my husband (snoring or just breathing bless him), wearing one ear plug on my top ear to muffle sounds but still be able to hear my little boy.

I found it very lonely and debilitating