Trouble sleeping

[Cassandra]

My blood results are all in the high range of normal - I take thyroxine plus T3

I only get a few hours sleep per night (some none at all). I started to take a note of hours of sleep and have noticed one thing - even if I only go to sleep at 3 am I will be wide awake at 5 am. This is the same each day - don't know if it can be hormonal at my age (65) but it is strange. No tea or coffee after 6 pm each evening so it's not caffeine related. Any ideas please.

[humanbean]

I would suspect you had problems with cortisol levels at that particular time. You might be producing too little or too much, and either can cause sleeping problems.

Cortisol also has an impact on blood sugar levels. If your blood sugar drops too low your body will make you wake up to do something about it.

A very simple thing you can try for the next few nights - eat a snack just before bed, but avoid simple sugars. Experiment with type of food and quantity. You might try a mug of hot milk and/or an oatcake with butter for example, or anything that fits in with your dietary choices.

Another obvious suggestion is to avoid caffeine after lunch, or stop drinking it altogether.

If the above simple experiments don't help, then you could start doing more complicated and expensive things like doing an adrenal stress saliva test :

gdx.net/uk/product/27

If the results show that your cortisol levels are deranged in some way then attempting to fix that (which is often not easy) can help with insomnia too.

One thing which reduced my sleeping problems was reducing physiological stress. In my case that entailed getting as many of my vitamin and mineral levels up to optimal levels as I could - but that took ages!