Zzzzzzzzzz...

Guess how many hours of sleep I got last night? 

Three.

I didn’t fall asleep until 4:30 am and then was wide awake by 7:30 am (luckily for me, a lack of sleep doesn’t turn me into a zombie anymore). If this was just a one-time thing, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but I have struggled with sleeping for as long as I can remember and do you know how annoying it is to lay awake for hours on end, desperately wanting to fall asleep? Even as a kid I would spend hours trying to fall asleep and then would wake up again in the middle of the night. The same happened all through high school (no wonder it was so hard to get me out of bed for school in the mornings) and through my undergrad. I have spent countless nights tossing and turning or pacing around my room because I just couldn’t shut my mind off long enough to fall asleep, either that or I wake up at 4 am raring to go. During my undergrad, when I was misdiagnosed with depression, my sleep troubles were attributed to that and I was put on sleeping pills because nothing else would work. Then when I received my bipolar diagnosis, I figured that that was causing my sleep problems because for a little while after starting the antipsychotics I found that I could fall asleep easier, my mind didn’t race as much. However, those effects wore off and so far no changes to my drug regimen have been able to permanently solve my sleeping problem and it was then that I determined that the ADHD was actually responsible. This is the only thing that really makes sense because the sleep troubles started before the bipolar kicked in during high school and when I looked into it some more, I found that many people with ADHD report having difficulty falling and staying asleep.

So what do you do about it? Unfortunately, sedatives are out of the question because they’re not meant for long-term use and melatonin tablets don’t seem to do it for me. Right now, my psychiatrist is altering the antipsychotics but I believe that that will only be a temporary solution to the problem as I seem to build up a tolerance to the sedative effects very quickly. However, there is something I came across recently that may have some merit and could be worth a shot in the future. When reading up on ADHD and sleep trouble I came across an article that suggested taking a second dose of your stimulant medication at bedtime. And why not? You use it during the day to calm your system and keep you on task so why wouldn’t it do the same at night, keeping you on the task of falling asleep? Now I’m sure a lot of you are skeptical of me calling falling asleep a task but when you spend countless nights wide awake in your bed because your mind won’t shut off, falling asleep really does become a chore. There’s a quote saying that falling asleep is the easiest thing to do, all you have to do is close your eyes and drift off, and I read somewhere else that it takes the average person 7 minutes to fall asleep…who are these people?!?! Sleeping is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, hopefully not for long though.