Sweet Sweet Sleep
Most people probably know that I don’t sleep well. Some nights it’s waking up 5 times, other nights it’s not ever falling asleep. It baffles me that when I take this sort of symptom to a doctor, they don’t really look too deep into it. They ask if I feel depressed, I say no. They ask if there’s noise, I say yes; and, point out that I have $25 ear plugs that don’t help. They ask if I have any lights on, I say, “I’ve made my room as dark as the void”. Drugs, no. Do you do more than sleep and have sex in your bed? No. The list goes on. These are all WELL known issues for people who often find they occasionally have restless sleep. Given that this has been a problem for 5 years now, I’m suspecting that perhaps there’s something more at work here.
My first suspect is sleep apnea. It’s hard to really, diagnose this problem myself, as should sleeping when it happens. The tests for this are usually done at a sleep centre, but you have to be referred by your family physician to go there. There are ways to test at home, but for the most part it’s more accurate to do them at a sleep centre.
My second is depression. Now, just because when some one asks me if I’m depressed and I say no, doesn’t mean I’m not. Honestly, I just don’t know how to gauge things like depression on myself. It’s the same problem I have when people ask me if I’m stressed. I just can’t answer the question objectively. So, perhaps I am, but then again, I doubt it. I just don’t have any other symptoms that really match up with depression.
A circulatory problem seems to be the next most popular reason for insomnia. I do have a few circulatory issues which, could, if I stretched my imagination, be a cause for my problems. Most of them are excessively rare and often follow other more common to diagnose issues people have. Since I don’t have any of those, it’s also not likely (unless it’s lupus, but I’ve been tested for that twice now… who knows).
Like depress, perhaps stress. I do tent to worry about a lot of things, even if I don’t externalize those worries. I have a bad happy of playing the what-if game in my head far to often, so it is possible I’m setting myself up to be stressed about things that really shouldn’t be stressful. Again, I’m not good at this sort of thing, but online stress questioners suggest I shouldn’t be stressed.
I’m all out of idea’s really. I’m going to try to get my family doctor to refer me to a sleep clinic to rule out any obvious sleeping problems I have. Hopefully they find something wrong with me, just so I can get some sleep one of these days.
Note: I wrote this because, for the 18th night in a row I got less than 2 hours sleep. I don’t know what else to do.
