I don't mean to be nosy, but I've now read quite a few references to Ambien CR and insomnia. Is it a big problem among posters? How do you combat insomina or sleep deprivation during meets and training and life? I'm not a big sleeper myself in terms of # hours, but I seem to know a lot of folks suffering from insomnia. Some are resigned to their fate; others are unhappy. What gives?
Awake before 4:00 this morning. Watched the clock change numbers for a while. Finally got out of bed and am sitting at the 'puter killing time until I can go to the pool. It opens at 6.
Sleep isn't problem except I have to get up for work. I'm asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. I'll even sleep through the alarm if my wife didn't wake me.
Because we have a 3 YO, my wife and I feed her and put her to bed by 7pm. We cook dinner and have a cozy dinner-out, in; at 8-9pm. Then relax with :drink: until 10pm and then crash. My wife sleeps through too, but has to get up when my daughter wakes at 7-7:30am (that's 12+ hours every night since she was 5 weeks old!) and she naps 2-3 hours every afternoon.:applaud:
So for some reason we are all big sleepers. We'll even nap on Saturday AND Sunday without effecting our nighttime sleep.
I have to disagree that drugs aren't helpful. I will occasionaly get to a point that even meditation and deep breathing don't work. It feels like I'm so exhausted I just can't sleep.
Even good sleep hygenie isn't always enough and by that point medication is needed. I have a very regular sleep routine, but I was still having problems falling asleep. With things like depression it's impossible to shut your mind off. I would meditate and fall into stage 1 sleep, but because I was depressed and my brain chemicals were out of whack (I'm guessing), I would wake up as soon as I started to drift off into stage 2. Without Ambien, I would have gone months without sleeping. I know that some people abuse it (but it's been that way with all drugs in history and will continue to be), but I use Ambien to get me back onto a sleep cycle when I fall out of mine for whatever reason.
Kinda off topic maybe...but when I was reading that skymall magazine on the plane a few months ago I came across this alarm clock thingy that also has a watch that you wear on your wrist. And the clock using a dector of sorts in the wristband knows what stage of sleep you are in...and since you cycle through the stages, if you put the alarm clock to wake u up at 530am, but you come out of REM at 515 and enter the sleep zone that is easiest to awake from feeling refreshed it will wake you up then...instead of waiting the 15minutes when you might be back into a deeper realm of sleep.
Idk how well it works, but I do know that me, being that I get very little sleep (4.5-5.5 hours a night), waking up feeling groggy and slow and unrested is a big deal. This alarm clock claims to allow you to wake up feeling the biggest benefit of what sleep you did get?
Hormonal flucuations in MEN and women can change or challenge our sleep cycles through out life. Please do not spam me for that comment as all gender's hormonal cycles vary with the stage of life they are in. That is another topic and why I capitalized the word men.
Sleep clinics can benefit people but they take work. Insomina can be a symptom of other problems and those problems need to be ruled out as the cause of sleep depervation. In the end sleep depervation takes work to over come and there is no easy solution.
Being accepting of YOUR sleep cycle and becoming informed about good sleep habits will go a long way towards helping ones sleep patterns. Everyone of us is unique and worrying about going to sleep will certainly not help our sleep patterns. Pills are not the answer.
Yes, I agree. I have known people (my mother, unfortunately) take valium to sleep. Ugh. That seems like a bad one and very addictive. It's made me very anti-drug.
I am generally accepting that I need and will get less sleep. My wife does seem to suffer from some of the hormonal fluctuations issues more than me, that is the only reason I made that comment. And I truly do not mean to offend anyone here.
The only person I know of that went to a sleep clinic had sleep apnea. Are you sure it would work for insomnia? It seems like a little self-treatment with behavioral therapy and some of the suggestions here would help. What can they do there that you couldn't do yourself?
I completely agree that the very worst thing for sleep is worrying about whether you will sleep. Then it become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And obviously insomnia can be caused by depression and undue stress, as anyone who reads knows.
I still like cold, dark and quiet best.
I see we finally had a sleep bragger. Way to go KNelson!
Wow. I need eight hours at the very least: otherwise I am totally useless—muscles dead, nodding off, the works. Sometimes it can take me a bit to fall asleep, but otherwise I am a rock. Big meets are the exception, but I will put in some ten or eleven hour nights beforehand. Yeah. I have troubles.
I've tested it a few times an I know I can't complete my sprint sets early morning if I slept less than approx. 7 hours. I do the drills and a bit of endurance training in these days.
