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struggling always & I mean always with sleep.. I get 3 to 4 hours a night if I’m lucky. Tried Ambien Seroquel & every otc drug available. All kinds of sleepy time teas but nothing works. I get so tired I start to hallucinate & my grip on reality starts to crack. I try naps during the day but I can’t for the life of me nod off. Currently I’m on 8 hours of sleep in 4 days & I am really hurting. Anyone else?
I am on sleeping average 8 hours sleep in 3 days since early June ‘19. My situation is due to ramifications from (‘06) Prostate cancer surgery and recent discontinuation of Ambien (7mg) prescribed by a Surgeon, also certified in Integrative Medicine and discontinuation of 50 mg daily of amitriptyline prescribed by my former Primary Care physician. When I recently changed physicians due to a move, I asked to stop all medicine and now I am dealing with Rebound Insomnia. My neurotransmitters are no longer functioning as originally designed due to the long standing medications.
Your comment about “really hurting” hit home with me. My impaired ability to focus and follow-through with tasks and even complete thoughts and sentences is so degrading. It’s like I’ve been reconditioned to survive each day instead of enjoy each day. I do not feel depressed at all. However, I am resentful that Ambien and Amitriptyline cam be prescribed so easily to address my negative symptoms from surgery with no alternatives. These powerful drugs may have altered my brain’s capacity to form a normal sleep cycle. The dependency created with medications are dangerous.
Eight hours of sleep in four days is truly awful and is close to my average sleep for the month of June. My insomnia started in March 2019 due to medication reaction and side effects. Like Chappyt described, the doctors don’t really look into the cause or continuation of the insomnia, just prescribe Ambien. Ambien has been extremely helpful for me in the past for short term use, like for traveling and changing time zones or just for a couple nights during stressful times. But the doctors really should intervene quickly when they know you are on it for two weeks or more.
To say you are really hurting is how many of us feel. For me I literally hurt with strong muscle aches, and then feel so bad you cannot drive safely, can’t learn new things and forget how to spell is so scary. I truly dinner time as my mind is shot and I can’t even plan a meal and is also the lowest energy time of day and can barely cook, its hard when you have someone depending on you. I am or was a very good cook and my family would boast about my meals, so to lose this ability was very sad for me.
Since March I spent about 2 months on Ambien, taking 5-7 days off of it every couple weeks. I’d average about 5 hours sleep on Ambien. When I was mostly off it, say taking it 2x week, that is when my sleep was really bad, averaging 2-3 hours per night and I stayed that way for about 6 weeks. I went to a sleep doctor and he started me on Stimulus Control which is under the “Resources” section here. The doctor added a few other modifications for my specific situation. About the 3rd week into it I started seeing improvement in sleep that was the beginning of July. Healing the brain from my trauma and trying to correct what the Ambien messed up will be a long process. But don’t get discouraged! It seems like so far in July about 1/3 of the days I’ve been able to sleep 6-7.5 hours per night, alternating a few good nights then a few nights with 2-4 hours sleep. I’m hoping in August I can increase my good nights to 50% of the time.
If either of you can afford this, you might try accupuncture. I did about 10 sessions, 2x a week. I wasn’t expecting an immediate result (I thought benefits would accumulate over time) but there were 3 times after a session where I slept 7 hours that night which was wonderful.
I really appreciate you sharing your insight here, gsdmom since I was going to encourage both Jthevampire and Chappyt to look into cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) techniques.
CBT-I is proven to be the most effective long-term treatment for chronic insomnia since it addresses the root cause of chronic insomnia — incorrect and/or inappropriate sleep-related thoughts and behaviors.
Quite often, the very things we do in a bid to improve our sleep actually perpetuate the problem.
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