Sleep is one of the most important parts of our overall health. Yet so many of us have terrible sleep, and therefore suffer health problems due to it. Diet and exercise are the obvious realms of health in modern society, but I feel education on good sleep is far behind the resources on diet and exercise, when considering how much more important good sleep is.
What differentiates good sleep vs bad sleep? Like a good diet vs a bad diet, part of it is whether you feel good after it and what makes you “healthy”. If you wake up every morning, feeling like you’ve had bad sleep, then unfortunately and obviously that’s probably true, and it might not be due to not being a morning person.
Just like excess fat on your exterior or excess visceral fat around your organs is a sign of a bad diet, excess daytime fatigue is a sign of bad sleep, as are mental fog and memory issues. These are all symptoms that need resolving, you don’t want to be tolerating them for life. They can make your life miserable and lower your lifespan, increasing the chances of many illnesses and disease.
Even though there are lots of us sleeping badly, and there are so many resources online about how to improve your sleep, sometimes it can still feel like nothing will improve it. There’s obviously some cog missing, but you can’t find it, sometimes it might be a combination of things, that will take a lot of work to unwind.
My own sleep has been hard to control the quality of, in the past I would sleep too much, 10-12 hours, it would be very difficult to wake up, and the excess time not moving would stiffen up my body, it would take all day to recover from sleeping, and then it’d be night-time and I’d finally have some energy but need to go to sleep. I’d be very lethargic during the day, and tired as soon as I woke up, it would be hard to concentrate and my pain would be the highest in the morning.
Then later I suffered insomnia, I was lucky if I got sleep for 3 hours a night, I’d wake up more than 10 times. Obviously once finally up, I’d be extremely tired, and running on fumes. The issues were the same with having too much sleep, and it took all day to recover. Insomnia was definitely worse than excess sleep, it increased anxiety and stress tremendously and it starts to break you little by little, some nights I’d get zero sleep. I’d follow all the guides, I followed every advice to try to improve my sleep, but nothing worked. Being prescribed melatonin and anti-depressants made it even worse, I had no sleep and felt even worse in the day.
But overtime, I managed to weather insomnia, and slowly clawed back slightly more sleep, even though I still woke up unrefreshed. The actual improvement I got was a long term adoption of not trying, and not pressuring myself to sleep, to just accept a sleepless night and try to not let it affect me. I continued to try different supplements and techniques, changed my mattress, pillow and sheets, adjusted temperature and light in the room, made my habits even more strict, no food or drink after certain times, obviously no caffeine was already something I did. I also tried to get enough steps in the day and an hour of exercise, even if that exercise was extremely light movements and stretching. The days when I couldn’t do it, I didn’t, when I could, I tried.
I’ve recovered from insomnia now, my sleep is still not restful, I’ve continued to trial a lot of supplements and medication, pretty much everything that’s available.
Magnesium definitely seems like a supplement that should help most people with their sleep, and there are a few supplement complexes with magnesium and other sleep promoting ingredients in them. Amitriptyline has also been helpful, however dosage is very hard to manage, and whilst it can help me sleep, it can be hard to wake up in the morning on higher dosages, if you then reduce the dosage, you don’t get as much benefit to sleep. It seems to work by nullifying nerve sensations a little.
My current biggest issue with sleep is probably pain and tinnitus, these two things still interrupt my sleep a lot. I have pelvic pain and it can be hard to sleep any position comfortably. I’ve tried many different sleep setups, and yet nothing seems to help long term. Cycling between relaxation and strength training of the pelvic floor, seems to be the best thing I can do going forward, as ultimately it’s a pelvic floor dysfunction that is causing most of my pelvic pain.
Tinnitus is very hard to deal with, sometimes it’s deafening, and it can be very stressful dealing with it. However I’ve had some medication that has cured my tinnitus completely. Unfortunately I had fatigue side effects and couldn’t stay on the medication, so hopefully I can find something that has less side effects.
The main problem is I’ve had sleep issues for 10 years, I think it’s difficult to unwind all that damage without years of good habits being invested, and so I continue to try to invest in good habits for sleep in the hope I can some day wake rested.
same here, having sleeping problems 🙁