Realtor1, I'm going to rearrange some of thei things in your last post to make it easier for me to respond.
About your pre-CPAP and pre-emergency room visit sleep patterns you write:
(10-27-2013, 08:53 PM)Realtor 1 Wrote: I had a very crazy busy Realtor's lifestyle which was like going to sleep at around 2 to 3am, getting up at 7(Because Children get up then for School) but used to go back to sleep till around 10am.
So you've got a history of being a bit of a night owl. I can identify with this all too well; I'm currently struggling to get my "delayed sleep phase" problem better under control.
Did this former sleep schedule work for you in the sense that you didn't really feel that you were seriously sleep deprived when you were sleeping in this pattern?
And if you could start sleeping like this again would that be better than what you're currently dealing with?
You write this about what happens now:
Quote:I usually go to bed at 11pm & stay in bed with my machine on till alarm goes at 7am .
and
Quote:Zopiclone usually put me to sleep between 30 minutes to 1.5 hrs. but I do wake up after a while.
Combining this information with the information about your old sleep schedule leads to these ideas:
1) I wonder if you're just plain trying too hard to get to sleep "on time" when your chosen bedtime is far earlier than what you were used to doing before all this stuff started. That might explain why it's taking the Zopiclone so long to work. Look at it this way, if you take the Zopiclone at 11:00 and it takes you 1.5 hours to get to sleep, that's about 1:30, which is about 30 minutes before your old "bedtime".
It may be worth moving bedtime back to midnight (or even 1:00) and taking the Zopiclone closer to your old bedtime and seeing if that would help it be a bit more effective at getting you to sleep at the start of the night.
2) In your old sleep pattern, you were getting yourself up after a few hours of (apnea-filled) sleep to get the kids off to school and then sleeping a couple more hours. It could be that your body is just not used to the idea of lying in bed being asleep for a full eight hours. And that may be feeding the additional restlessness during the end of the night. Your body may simply not expect and does not want to "be in bed for 8 hours straight."
3) You need to find a way of teaching your body
how to sleep when you are in bed again. And that's going to take some hard work. The usual piece of sleep hygiene that a specialist in cognitive behavior therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) uses for this is having the patient restrict the time in bed if they are making NO actual progress towards getting to sleep. People are often told to simply get out of bed and go into a different room if they've been lying in bed for 30 minutes or more without successfully getting to sleep. And to return to bed once they feel like they're starting to actually fall asleep. But with your past history of the four day stretches with NO sleep, this technique may not be practical for you to try. Nonetheless:
It may be worth asking for a referral to someone who does CBT-I and do that along with using the prescription sleeping pills.
4) It also sounds like you need to work with someone who can help you set some realistic
intermediate goals in your quest to rein in the insomnia. You may never sleep for eight solid hours from 11:00pm to 7:00am even with the help of CPAP and sleep meds, but that doesn't mean you won't be able to get a decent night's sleep eventually. Things to keep in mind about
normal sleep patterns as you are working your way through this nasty insomnia:
- While most adults need around 7-8 hours of sleep, some only need 6 hours to feel decently rested.
- A few (short) wakes are actually pretty typical of normal sleep patterns. It's not uncommon to wake up after each REM cycle just long enough to make sure everything is "ok" and then fall back asleep. The thing is a noninsomniac doesn't remember those short awakenings in the morning because they are typically less than 5 minutes long.
- Sleep efficiency can be just as important (or more important to some folks) than total sleep time when it comes to how they feel the next day. Sleep efficiency is the total sleep time divided by the time in bed. "Normal" is regarded as above about 85%---so a normal person might be awake as much as 70 minutes out of an 8 hour "time in bed" window. So if your sleep efficiency is way, way below that, working on improving the sleep efficiency by reducing the time in bed as a way of reducing the time spent tossing and turning and being restless and worrying about not being asleep sometimes is just as valuable as increasing the total sleep time.
Finally, you write:
Quote:At this moment I am willing to try anything to get myself some good sleep I don't really like taking Zopiclone a my head hurts all the time but it is the only thing which works for me although only to a certain extent.
It may not help you since you've got such a profound case of insomnia with that history of 4-day stretches with no sleep. But it may be worth your time to get a copy of
Sound Sleep, Sound Mind by Dr. Barry Krakow. The first part of the book looks at common behavior patterns that many insomnias have that tend to aggravate the insomnia and how to change those behavior patterns to something that encourages sleeping when you are physically in your bed. The second part of the book is actually a look at sleep disordered breathing and how untreated sleep disordered breathing can manifest itself as severe insomnia.
Well, it's now past 1:30AM my time, and that's my bedtime when I'm dealing with fighting insomnia. So here's hoping that you got a decent night's sleep when you see this sometime tomorrow.