Sleeping sucks sometimes. Let’s be honest, sleeping is one of those things that can either make or break you. You need effective sleep in order for your body to function and for good mental health, but it can become a vicious cycle because sometimes you can’t sleep because your body isn’t relaxing, you’re sick, or because you can’t shut up your mind – all things that sleep can help you with.
I talked about it briefly in one of my Thailand posts, but I recently got completely off-cycle with my sleep. I was going to bed when the sun came up and woke up as it was starting to set. It was like I was living that Teen Titan moment where they go “Suns up, time for bed”. And while I’ve definitely lived that moment many times in my life – I worked the night shift for years – I didn’t actually mean to this time. It was a combination of staying up to talk to people back in the states (12 hour time difference), my brain not shutting up, and honestly not doing much so my body still had too much energy to relax.
I took a bit of time in Krabi Town in Thailand to attempt to get back in order. And while I’m not back completely. At least I’m finally sleeping when the sun is down again.
The trick that I use is actually one that a doctor suggested to me over 15 years ago. When I was a teen, I had a terrible time sleeping (okay, yes, I still do…it didn’t really go away, I just got better with handling it most of the time). Like most teens, that meant that I would get yelled at by my parents – for me it was because I was staying up reading (shocking I know). Eventually during an argument with my mom about it, I said something along the lines of “I don’t know why I just know I can’t sleep and I don’t want to just stare at my ceiling for hours so I’m reading!”
My mom, like most moms to teens, decided to call my bluff. She figured if that was the case then we would go to the doctor and they could tell me what was wrong (obviously she was assuming that the doctor would support her. Spoiler alert – they actually didn’t). So we went to the doctor and they had me do a sleep study. It was honestly terrible, the point of a sleep study is to sleep, that meant I couldn’t just pull out a book when I couldn’t fall asleep and so I was in a hospital bed, hooked up to a bunch of machines, there was a bunch of noise that was going on and I was completely awake but unable to do much. I couldn’t even move around to get rid of some of the energy. My mom was passed out in a bed next to me, and I was staring at the ceiling trying to will myself to sleep. It was not a fun night.
Now, this has been over 15 years so I can’t remember all the details but essentially, we met back with the doctor, my mom most likely thinking the doctor would tell me that I was just being a teenager and I could sleep just fine. Instead, the doctor said I had a mild case of sleep apnea, a pretty bad case of insomnia, restless leg syndrome, and something else that I can’t remember the name of but the gist of it was that my circadian rhythm is essentially backwards and my brain thinks day is night and night is day. (unrelated, but a future doctor idly speculated that that might relate to the light sensitivity I have from my daily headaches and chronic migraines – never been tested/proven, but it would make sense).
Needless to say though – I had a typical teen moment where I’m pretty sure that I said “I told you so” to my mom, or at least gave her a look that suggested that. The results? I went to an ENT to get my tonsils out to solve the sleep apnea, attempted some meds for the restless legs (didn’t work, ended up finding other routes for when that gets bad such as stretching and working out), and I was given some suggestions for ways to combat insomnia and the circadian rhythm thing. Technically I did try meds too when I was in college, but my body didn’t respond well to them and I went to bed not because the meds made me tired but because I hated the feeling of vertigo, dizziness, etc. Not really a success story for the meds.
Over the years, I’ve learned different tactics that work for me to sleep. And let’s be honest, it’s been long enough that the diagnosis may not all be true anymore for me – there’s a reason they sometimes tell you to get testing done again as you get older (depending on what it’s for), your body changes. But either way, one of the main things that does actually work for me when I get my sleeping too far out of whack, is actually what I ended up doing in Thailand. When I’m working, or when I was in school, it can be ‘easy’ enough to shock my system back into alignment – though that is by what I call the brute force method where I basically just get no sleep for a couple days and then pass out at 8pm and sleep for 12 hours. That’s not the healthiest way, but it is effective when I don’t have the time to do it the more gradual way.
That gradual way I first did during the summer after I got the sleep study done. Basically, every night you stay up 3 hours later. So if you normally go to bed around 3am (a very typical bedtime for me over the years. Though I’m closer to 2am nowadays), then the next night you go to bed at 6am, then 9am, then noon, then 3pm, 6pm, and finally you’re at 9pm. At that point, you can stay up for another hour or two or even 3 until you get to the bedtime that you actually want to be going to bed at. The hard part at that point is to stick to it the next couple of nights! But this is a gradual and much more healthy way to get your system back in order. I’ve used this a couple of times over the years and I used it again in Thailand. It’s not 100%, but that has to do with the fact that I don’t really have a lot of “you have to be up by this time” mornings in my life right now.
So yeah. Sleep is difficult, but at least I’ve got some tricks up my sleeve to make it a little easier over the years.
