Insomnia experience due to an excessively creative personality!
Posted , 2 users are following.
I’d like to share my experience of a few years of moderately serious insomnia and my solution that has led me to recover over the past few couple of months. Hopefully it will help someone else.
Before I tell you my solution (last two paragraphs) I just need to tell you a bit of the back-story …
It started when I was. I’m 27 now. Looking back perhaps I have never been a brilliant sleeper, but the whole thing largely came out of the blue. I did all the usual things people tell you to do at first. No caffeine, lavender, milky drink, relaxing music, exercise, getting up etc, etc. All no help to me whatsoever (I now know trying to do all those ‘tricks’ probably made it worse!). My average was 4 hours a night. But 1, 2 or even 3 days a week would be 1 or 0 hours sleep. On a weekend I might be lucky and eventually get to 6 hours due to not having to go to work but that was a treat! Nytol worked a little bit at first but after a while I was taking 3 of the ‘1 a night’ tablets over the course of the night and it still having no effect whatsoever – must have built up a resistance.
I learned to cope surprisingly well at work. All but 2 days in those three years did I miss any time off work due to the insomnia and managed to do all the jobs and interacting I had to do up to a good standard. But when I got home I was an utter zombie. I missed out on seeing friends, going out, just generally things I wanted to do. It made me so irritable. It used to make me cry a lot and I know it began to get distressing for my family to see me in such a state.
I know things were getting bad when I began drinking myself to sleep out of desperation a couple of times. I’d literally buy a bottle of spirit and drink it in bed until somehow sleep was achieved. Doctor prescribed me sleeping pills. They worked very well but quite rightly I was only allowed to take them short term.
I turned to the internet and googled away and friends and family tried to help me too but the advice was always the same – “you must be anxious”. But I wasn’t anxious! I was definitely a very happy person (apart from not sleeping of course) I had nothing to worry about, my life was really good. So why on earth was I cursed with this problem?! It was really baffling.
My insomnia was fairly unusual... Like many insomnia sufferers, when I would go to bed my mind ‘wouldn’t switch off’ but it was the way it wouldn’t switch off which was fairly extraordinary. Basically, when I closed my eyes ready to go to sleep I was plagued by ‘visions’. It’s hard to explain but if you put a camera to my head you would see a crazy miscellany of things. Places I had visited, bits from tv programmes, imaginary things, shapes and colours as complicated as a moving aboriginal painting -all flashing through my head. It wasn’t every single night this used to happen but it was frequent enough to train my mind into the habit of ‘bedtime was not a time for sleeping’.
Then the summer holidays came. I worked in a school and I thought that over the 6 weeks holidays – without the pressure of work- I would be able to crack the problem by being ‘relaxed’ but in fact things got worse. This is when I truly realized my problem was not anxiety related. I had run out of ideas so I decided to go about making chances in my life and lo and behold they worked!
I enjoyed my job but I knew it wasn’t what I really wanted to do, nor well-paid. I gave it up and now I make my living from being a nanny and a waitress and far more importantly, I have more time to concentrate on my art and craft hobbies. I have always been a very artistic person- ever since I can remember
I truly believe allowing myself far more time be creative – like my character is naturally inclined to be- has been the silver bullet. Now I do my art and craft late into the evenings and then I go to bed and fall asleep within half an hour which is a minor miracle to me! No more ‘visions’. I can only conclude that I am more creative than most people and I have to ‘use it’ in order for my mind to be able to rest. I have had 3-4 months of good sleep now so perhaps I have recovered? My fingers are crossed.
0 likes, 3 replies
AS06480
Posted
I whittered on a bit there too! In a nutshell what I was trying to say was... If you are of the 'artistic type', getting on with doing arty things could help you if you suffer from sleep problems. 'Get's it out of your system' so to speak!
P.S I don't get wonderful sleep EVERY night nowadays (though it is 10000000 times better than it used to be!) -Will occassionally have the odd night of 4 hours but that is perfectly managable - the deamon has gone.
Actually ended up getting frustrated with this website and didn't get off till 3 last night - the irony! haha
MultiverseMind AS06480
Posted
I want to share my experience with you. It happened roughly three years after I left high school. In early June, I was excited for the long-awaited sequel to my favorite video game series. That particular night, I was too excited by the news of its reveal to sleep well. I didn't think much of this at first, as I had the odd sleepless night every now and then. But the next night was the same story. And the next. Before I knew it, I was tossing and turning at night, cursing myself for being unable to sleep. I became testy and irritable. I lost my appetite as well (normally I'm a generous eater, so this worried my family immensely). I tried every method I'd heard of (and some I didn't even know about) to fix the problem, but nothing worked.
MultiverseMind AS06480
Posted
By this time, I hadn't yet realized I was a maladaptive daydreamer as in, basically someone whose imagination is on overdrive. I didn't know it at the time, but the reason I lay awake nights was because I stressed over getting those forty winks. It took my father, younger sister, and even several of my own fictional characters, to make this revelation. The key was simply to stop thinking about it (for someone who literally can't stop imagining things, this was rather difficult). Once I did that, sleep gradually came back to me (and the fact I kept a sleep journal helped too). So as a fellow creative mind (I write as a hobby. Right now there are at least five stories being juggled and five or so more in my head.) I wish you well and hope that you turn out okay. Best wishes!