I have insomnia.  It comes and goes, but I’ve been dealing with it for as long as I can remember.

Sometimes it’ll leave me alone for months at a time.

Sometimes it’ll show up for a day or two and then go away.

Sometimes, like now, it’ll show up and hang on for weeks and weeks.

For at least the last month, I’ve been sleeping about 3 hours, waking up in the middle of the night for about 2 hours, then back to sleep for an hour or two.  Every night.

Other chronic insomniacs know what this means.

This means I have the CRAZY.  I can’t think straight.  I forget the right words to use.  All the little points of flashy light and streamy colors in the corners of my eyes make it hard to concentrate.

I’m not going to lie.  It is kinda fun.  Certainly makes life more interesting. Especially since right now I don’t have a job or little ones to take care of.  I can pretty much sit here and be crazy and it’s not bothering anyone.  Except my facebook friends and twitter followers.

But on the other hand, my fuse is pretty short right now.  I’ve stumbled into a few walls because I lost my balance.  I’m just… exhausted.

The last few nights have been the worst though.  Tuesday and Wednesday night each I slept about 90 minutes.

You’re probably going, “Go get some Ambien dumbass.”  And yeah, if it’s still this bad when I have my surgery consult on Feb. 1, I will.  But generally speaking, I don’t really like to take medication.  I prefer more natural remedies.

Over the years, I’ve tried them all – valerian, melatonin, along with doing all the “sleep hygiene” stuff – limiting caffeine, working out regularly, not staying in the bed when I can’t sleep, etc.

I tried a new one last night from an article Jerrad found online.  You can read the whole thing if you’re interested, but basically 5-HTP is supposed to work in a similar way to melatonin to restore normal, healthy sleep and dreaming patterns. He picked some up at one of the plethora of hippie natural foods stores here and I tried it last night.

I would say the jury is still out.  I slept from about 2-4 am, then was up for about two hours during which I engaged in activities you don’t want to hear about.   And no, it was NOT any sort of sexy time with my husband.

But. I did fall back asleep for almost four hours after that.  FOUR HOURS PEOPLE! I was practically jumping for joy.  Even though they were four very fitful hours where I’m pretty sure I turned into a werewolf,  was part of some sort of swat team trying to rescue someone from a castle, and I think there may have been a spaceship involved somewhere.

So, that little part of the article that says you might have vivid dreams? Umm, yeah that’s one way to put it.

But I also don’t have the sleep hangover you get from taking something like benadryl or sleepy time pain relievers.

I’m definitely trying it again tonight.  Maybe I’ll find out how that rescue turned out…

Tags: 5-HTP, insomnia, insomnia remedies, sleep hygiene

This entry was posted by Cathy on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.