Can't sleep

[Maisie1]

It's 0145 and I am up at 0530hrs. Just cat get to sleep. Will feel terrible whenI get up.

[Beevee]

Me too but so what? If you try to sleep , you won't. Just let things be. If the mind is racing, let it race. Just observe it racing and don't question any of it. If you sleep, you sleep. If you don't, you don't. What's the worst that can happen? You feel tired tomorrow. On a positive note, my anxiety was lower when tired because I couldn't be bothered to fight the symptoms whic keep you in the anxiety loop. Your body will tell you when you are tired. You will fall asleep.p and won't be able to stop it. It may not be tonight or tomorrow night but it will happen. Oh, and forget that myth about needing 8 hours a night.

[Maisie1 in reply to Beevee]

I very rarely get 8 hours sleep

[jrcnpg]

Sleep is a fundamental necessity since during sleep the body does its bits and pieces repairing anything which may be wrong. Insomnia is a medical condition yet applies only to anyone with a persistently poor sleep pattern, a condition I have and have had for over thirty years. GP's will no longer hand out sleep aid medication because of their addictive properties yet they may prescribe them for a short period of time. Having eight hours sleep per night, undisturbed sleep, is not a myth but an established fact.

[Beevee in reply to jrcnpg]

Hi jrcnpg

I agree that it is possible to sleep for 8 hours but if someone is giving themselves a hard time because they are sleeping for less, they will never recover from anxiety or insomnia. Recovery lies with having a "I no longer care" attitude which releases the tight grip a sufferer has on anxiety and allows them to float above all the symptoms. However if you are striving for the 8 hours, you are just putting more pressure on yourself and the opposite to not caring. Do you see what I mean?

[jrcnpg]

I agree with you completely yet in the case of some people (I include myself in this group) it simply is not possible to sleep for an hour let alone eight hours! Back in my day the only medications for sleep, dedicated medications, were either barbiturates or what was then something new, those being benzodiazapines. When my first son was born, his mother developed post-natal depression and from the moment we brought him home it fell to me to tend to him, something I had no history of. At the time I had been taking 10mg of nitrazepam each evening for over ten years but logic dictated to me that it probably would not be a very good idea to continue with such a regime and therefore from that very first evening I stopped the nitrazepam. No one had warned me of the dangers of stopping a benzodiazapine quickly, cold turkey although that is a term I do not like to use for whatever reason. I thought I was dying and I made no connection in my mind between that kind of feeling and the nitrazepam. I saw my GP the day after and she was very apologetic even though she was not the first prescriber. Needless to say I am now on a cycle of one kind of benzodiazapine for two weeks and a different one for another two weeks. My son is now 33, by the way, and I would never in a million years relinquish the experience of raising a baby and, I hope, in the best possible way. But you are quite right in what you say.

Regards

John