How to Get By On Little Sleep-9 Tips That Work

My Husband The Insomniac

Awake: Viktoria B.

The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep. ~ W. C. Fields

LOL…

Insomnia causes the slow death and erosion of trust in your brain.

Insomnia creates a loss of complete trust in your ability to be able to do one of life’s seemingly essential and straightforward functions for survival, and that is to sleep.

I watch it happen every night with my husband.

Last night, in the dark, as I rolled over and opened my eyes and became aware he was lying awake, he said to me, “I think I am on the verge of a major panic attack.”

I didn’t need to ask him why. It has happened before.

Within the night, the fear, the overwhelming urge to sleep, the inability to shut down a wired brain, the apparent loss of his ability to control his mind, and the fear of not sleeping all combine in a lethal cocktail of anxiety that sometimes peaks in panic.

I had been aware during the night of him constantly getting up and down. He paces. He sometimes writes. He often eats (to fill in time in the hours of aloneness that he is trying to focus on anything but not sleeping). He sighs, he meditates, he reads, before once again turning off the light and lying still on the bed, whereby I can feel him willing himself to sleep.

I am not always so patient with him. I can wake and immediately fall back to sleep, but constant waking, if he is restless, leads to a poor sleep quality for myself on those nights.

Last night, was one of those nights.

It doesn’t help that we are sleeping on a blow-up mattress on the floor in my daughter’s spare room.

We are staying with her and her partner as she has just given birth and we are here to help out. Every time my husband moves, or gets up and down, the mattress rocks and sways with the compressed air inside, and then I awaken.

In my tired and obviously most supportive state due to being awake for the 50th time, I JUST want him to DECIDE.

DECIDE. Do I get up or stay down? Do I lay down, or do I get up? Do I stay in the lounge or do I come back to bed? If I am standing in the bedroom, why am I standing?

Make a decision and stick with it. Just be done with it. Stop all the faffing about.

Yes, I am that bloody inconsiderate when the man I love is keeping me awake because of his wakefulness.

Insomniacs will realize the absurdness of this when all they long for is to capture the hours that their spouses DO sleep even though they fleetingly may open their eyes during the night.

But from my perspective, I want NOT to be awoken even for those microseconds that occur multiple times a night. I want to be able to sleep in one continuous block all the way through the night.

I know. The selfishness of it knows no bounds — the audacity.

I feel the weight of my own longing to stay asleep as a burden within my marriage. I know my husband experiences the weight of his own longing to go to sleep as a burden.

We both are carrying burdens. Can we not just put them down and go to sleep?

Please?

I know my husband longs to do this with every fiber of his being, but for some reason, he just can’t. He also wants for me to understand his lack of sleep is not due to lack of desire to sleep. He would be willing to sacrifice his right arm if he could sleep each night.

I do know this. I understand this. But in the dead of night, after waking up for the umpteenth time, I don’t care. I JUST want him to come or go, stay or leave, sleep or not sleep. But stop tooing and froing as it is killing me. It is killing us both.

If you can’t sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It’s the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep. ~ Dale Carnegie

At 55 years old and exhausting every possible option he can think of, my husband gets desperate. He gets so tired, and his quality of life is so compromised when we are aware from home that life becomes unbearable when he cannot sleep.

When you have insomnia, you’re never really asleep, and you’re never really awake. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

On a regular basis, he experiences the roller coaster of renewal of hope amid new realizations, discoveries, new enthusiasm that maybe, just maybe, THIS may be the solution, THIS may be the THING that helps him get more than a few hours of sleep.

The roller coaster of hope has waned over the decades to gentle dips and dales.

How He Copes With Insomnia

AT HOME, we have devised a routine for sleep that works for our marriage and for both of us to survive his insomnia.

It is also a way that my husband has managed to build a life and live around his insomnia incorporating and accepting the fact it is part of who he is and has been for as long as he can remember (right back to childhood).

Although he never loses hope that one day, it will be resolved, in the meantime, he has to learn to try and live the best quality of life, within insomnia.

AND HE DOES THIS AMAZINGLY WELL.

• We sleep in separate bedrooms in our own beds.
• We start each night together, in my bed and then about 11 pm my husband takes his pillows and goes off for the night to his bedroom.
• He reads from 11 pm onwards.
• He takes a dose of magnesium powder in water between the hours of 12–1 p.m.
• He has a drink of milk about 2 am.
• He puts his book down and starts to try and sleep between 2.00 am and 2.30 am. He cannot even attempt to begin to try and sleep before this as it is NEVER successful. It just prolongs the hours he gets up and down exhausted all through the night.
• He worked out through the years that if he can get 4–5 hours of uninterrupted sleep per night he can function reasonably well throughout the day.
• Most of the time he cannot sleep without light. He has worked this out through trial and error over the years. Sleeping in total darkness usually leads to increased insomnia and panic. He, therefore, has a low-level light in the room that he will switch on if the dark is a problem on a particular night.
• He has no drinks or foods containing caffeine from 2 pm in the afternoon.
• He will try and sleep (getting up to pee a couple of times) between 2.00 am and 7 am. Occasionally he is able to sleep between 3.00 am to 9.00 am (hallelujah, for those days).
• When he gets up to pee (three or four nights of the week), he cannot get back to sleep for an hour or so.

He has realized he has an exceptionally long circadian rhythm compared to the majority of people.

• He has to make allowances for the unnatural length of his sleep cycle.
• He actually can still function on what he believes is a relatively productive standard on only four or so hours interrupted sleep a night. This is his version of ‘normal.’
• If he cannot fall asleep until 4–5.00 am in the morning, he will get about 2–3 hours of sleep. If this catastrophic sleep pattern establishes itself, then this annihilates any quality of life. He is in a constant fog. His ability to function and do well in anything he does during the day is negatively impacted.
• He regular journals each day, where the free writes any fears, hopes, and anxieties that are in his head.
• He engages in a regular practice of meditation, at least 20 minutes each day this helps to still his mind. If he keeps this as a daily habit, he finds that he rarely slips into catastrophic insomnia and he remains at regular awful insomnia.

It is only when we are not in our own home that his inability to sleep outside of his routine becomes completely unmanageable.

• These times we are out of routine it can take two or three days to reestablish his sleeping pattern once we return to our own home.

Attempted Solutions

• He has adverse reactions to most pharmaceutical solutions over the years. They can have the opposite effects on him. The multiple brands of antidepressants he has tried make him flat, and more depressed, even suicidal. His insomnia gets worse, not better. He has tried to stay on them the recommended six weeks to see if the side effects stop to no avail. Occasionally one will work well for up to about a month and then invariably they stop working and his sleeping becomes worse than ever.
• The sleeping tablet Stilnox gave him hallucinations, and he was hallucinating and sleepwalking during the night which was terrifying for both of us. He would speak out loud, shout out, and be running and walking around the house having conversations with people who were not there, and sometimes even looking to leave the house (thank goodness he could not unlock the door).
• He has cut out all alcohol for months with no effect.
• He has cut out all dairy, wheat and other types of food over the years for varying lengths of time.
• At times, when he has tried all of these things, his sleep improves and then within a few weeks his insomnia returns back to normal levels. He has persisted through hoping the relapse is only temporary, but it has never improved.
• He has cut all electronic equipment usage from mid-afternoon onwards. This has not made any difference.
• He has tried reiki, meditation, visualizations, guided online sleep music, white noise, and guided sleep meditations. They usually all work for short periods, then completely stop working.
• He reintroduces trying all of them, at different times, and some nights they work, but they never work on a consistent enough basis that he incorporates them into his nightly routine.
• He saw a psychiatrist who believed his symptoms of night terrors accompanying his insomnia (that had started becoming more frequent over a six month period) related to some traumatic event. He had no recollection of any traumatic event in his upbringing.

After analyzing and some discussion he identified a time 20 years previously when his first marriage ended and he stayed the night at his mother’s after finding out his wife had an affair.

He said all during the night he shook violently, and was cold and couldn’t warm up, even though it was not a cold night.

In the night terror he would dream he would be tasked with finding the solution to an impossible problem. If he could not find the solution people close to him, sometimes including himself would be faced with something terrible happening. All the dreams revolved around this same theme.

He would wake in an absolute panic as he realized no matter how hard he tried he could not resolve the issue/problem. Then his panic would set in as he realized his family would be harmed. He would then wake up with his heart pounding, and distressed and frightened.

After he had identified that this was THE occasion when he had been in shock after emotional trauma the night terrors stopped and have not come back.

Family History of Insomnia

He has four sisters who all have insomnia the same as he does, and that also whenever they are not in their own home, do not sleep at all, or only for such limited amounts of time, that it makes being away from home a nightmare for them.

Insomnia has been present since late adolescent although it never became a persistent problem until his 30s when his first marriage ended, and he became a single dad with two boys to raise.

He has a personality that is affected by a change, even positive change. Any small change in routine throws off his sleep pattern and his ability to settle. Any news, good or bad, has the same effect, throwing off any minor semblance of a sleeping pattern he has established.

In Summary

My husband and I have negotiated a sleep routine that works for our marriage as well as supports his difficult sleep patterns.

We go to bed together.

At some point nearing midnight (I am nearly always asleep) he leaves to go into his bedroom.

He only stays in his bedroom to sleep.

He will read but won’t use his computer or phone in his bedroom at night.

He only starts trying to sleep once it is about 2.30 am in the morning as otherwise, he is just lying there worrying about not sleeping.

He allows himself to sleep later than other people do before arising in the morning as he recognizes his circadian rhythm is more prolonged than ‘normal.’

He no longer WORRIES about his sleep if he is not sleeping. He will get up and do something else. Then he will go back and try another technique (listening to a guided meditation, music or putting on a low light, having a glass of milk, reading his book). Then after a brief period of time, he will try and lay down and sleep again.

He has totally accepted that worry about not sleeping is not helpful and is actually as bad as not sleeping.

He has accepted that some nights he will not sleep uninterrupted and he will have to adjust what he is able to accomplish the next day. He has accepted insomnia is part of who he is. He no longer fights against it. He rides with the waves and ups and downs of his irregular sleep pattern and adjusts accordingly.

He is what I would call a ‘decisive insomniac.’

He has made decisions about how to manage his insomnia and on the whole, they work for him.

He has one or two nights a fortnight where his sleep is abysmal, and he can barely function the next day but, on the whole, he manages his poor sleep so that he can perform and thrive despite only getting a fraction of what most people would consider essential. He sticks to his routines, and he manages his anxiety and any changes in his life as best he can.

Any holidays or different place of sleeping — is catastrophic for his sleeping.

We limit when we go away.

I admire him so much as I would be a raving horrible lunatic to be around if I had as little sleep as he does.

We currently are away and will be for another four nights. He is a trooper. I feel so sorry for being so grumpy at him for his constant moving on the mattress we are sharing. I know for sure that I am not as good a person at heart he is. But we love each other. He is fantastic.

Despite, and probably BECAUSE of being

A DECISIVE INSOMNIAC.