Tired bc I sleep only 2 hours per night - Cure Parkinson's

Cure Parkinson's

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Tired bc I sleep only 2 hours per night

theAfrican profile image
14 Replies

what’s to do??

thank you

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theAfrican profile image
theAfrican
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14 Replies
Jalia profile image
Jalia

My husband is the same, keeps falling asleep during that day. It's a vicious circle. I await replies to your post with interest !

CuriousMe12 profile image
CuriousMe12

Hi My personal approach to sleep is

Exercise if poss to get tired

No food or drink 3 hours before bed

Stretch all parts of body before bed

Read or something relaxing

A firm mattress and pillow helps me

pdpatient profile image
pdpatient

You can get some relief if you Can get some sleep during the day. I am lucky enough to get my 8 hours in during the day in one stretch but only after my family stopped fighting my nocturnal awakening. I used to make it up in a number of small naps earlier because they would constantly interrupt my sleep schedule in a vain attempt to get my circadian rhythm back to 'normal' people patterns.

They gave up, my care team gave up and I am a very happy night owl 😁😂😊

daughter-Advocate profile image
daughter-Advocate in reply to pdpatient

Lol what do you end up doing during the night time?

pdpatient profile image
pdpatient in reply to daughter-Advocate

Whatever I would usually do during the day, including watching TV. I also eat during the night because I fast during the day. If you are curious, I sleep between 4pm and 12am. I have tried sleeping like normal people and I can't so I gave up fighting.

Research has shown that the circadian cycle is disrupted in people with Parkinsons. So there is a scientific reason behind it. The trick is to convince the family and or caretakers.

Rafiki2 profile image
Rafiki2

I recently started getting my wife to listen to Guided Sleep Meditation from YouTube and she is finding this very therapeutic. She uses a light set of headphones which are ideal for when she lies in bed and after about 10 to 15 minutes, I remove them once she is asleep.

When she has to get up to go to the toilet, which happens regularly, she often starts to hyperventilate when getting back to bed and her right hand shakes a lot. I presume that this is because by then she is having an "off" period. Taking a CL pill would take too long to kick in so then I apply the headphones once again for about 10 minutes and she goes back to sleep. Her shaking right hand also improves quite dramatically.

There are a large number of these Guided Sleep Meditation videos of varying times, from just a few minutes to several hours long, and one needs to try some out to find which ones work better for you. Some of our favourites ones are by a lady named Lauren Ostrowski Fenton. She has made dozens of videos.

These meditation videos, that one can do at any time of the day, are ideal for people that find it difficult to motivate themselves in doing the usual meditation. My wife has been doing this now for about 2 weeks and it has made a huge improvement to OUR sleep as her shaking hand would keep me awake as well.

Tayogi profile image
Tayogi

I’ve used cannabis with great success. Either concentrated oil of cannabis before bed of the RSO kind ( Rick Simpson oil) or just smoking if I wake up in the middle of the night

koshca profile image
koshca

600mg gabapentin+ 10 mg THC eatable marijuana

koshca profile image
koshca

Every night before bed

MarionP profile image
MarionP

Are you taking any medications that would keep you from going to sleep? For instance, if you are taking duloxetine, and snri, it acts like a stimulant. In that case you might want to take it early in the day so that my sleep time it's effect is minimized.

Melatonin, it naturally prepares you to sleep and your brain produces less of it as you age, to the point where you have a deficiency by the time you're in your 40s but your brain still needs it to help get ready for sleeping. There's almost no limit to how high a dose you can use, it's extremely safe and it is even an antioxidant. You can play around with it, take it about 45 minutes before you go to bed. If you wake up later you can take another dose that's no problem.

Meanwhile read a book in bed, listen to YouTube rain videos which will run for several hours or even longer, there are also fireside type videos, with headphones or earphones or not, whichever works just leave it playing.

Meds: 1/4 to 1/2 a milligram of clonazepam does very well and if you take it an hour before bed you shouldn't have any after effects in the morning.

Something else if you don't necessarily need to be up and around, working or whatever, in the morning, then one thing you can do is if you wake up, just don't bother worrying about it, read something til you're a little more tired or ready to go to sleep. If you have time during the day, don't worry about taking naps, worry about being disturbed while you're taking naps. Just let the naps happen.

As we get older, we generally do sleep less at night, at least straight through, the problem is we expect to sleep a full night and it's the difference between our expectation and what's natural that causes us some grief, this is how a doctor once put it to me. It's not so much that you're sleeping less at night or they can't sleep so far through the night, is that you think that's a problem and don't like it. He said change your expectation and that might find you some room to feel better, as long as you sleep a couple hours at a time and get some non-REM sleep, make it up with naps during the day as you feel tired and able to, there's no medical problem.

If you are snoring and waking yourself up because you have a heart condition and sleep on your back, maybe you have apnea and need to deal with that medically.

theAfrican profile image
theAfrican in reply to MarionP

thank you MarionP. It’s a very helpful information.

MarionP profile image
MarionP in reply to theAfrican

Sure, just ideas. I also forgot to mention you can take 25 mg or 50 mg of a antihistamine called diphenhydramine, which is generic of benadryl. I do that if I want to go off to sleep and not have to turn to asking a doctor for a prescription for clonazepam. Benadryl makes me sleepy and a lot of people, it's commonly used for that.

chartist profile image
chartist

A combination of melatonin, theanine, magnesium and zinc is useful for sleep and health in general.

Melatonin - 3 to 12 mg

Theanine - 200 mg

Magnesium in a multi component form such as this :

amazon.com/Vitalitown-Magne...

Zinc - 25 mg

Art

bullet65 profile image
bullet65

Amitripyline

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