For the last few years I’ve had tremendous difficulty getting to sleep at night – plus apparently I snore like a bastard. Back when I was on Twitter, I asked about the snoring in particular and got some recommendations which boiled down to
- get more exercise
- try the Breathe-Rite nose strips (or similar) that pull your nose open
I did both of those things, and they helped some. Those are also decent advice for sleeping as well. But I’m less concerned about the snoring than the general lack of getting to sleep. I find my mind races at night and I get super tangled up mentally which contributes to the “revving engine” feeling where sleep won’t come.
I saw the doctor about this a while ago and at the time work was really busy so I thought it was work related stress. She prescribed a prescription only sleeping solution, I don’t remember the name Zolpidem aka Ambien, and holy crap it worked GREAT on me. I loved it. No matter how wound up I was, I could take one of those pills and be assured of getting a solid 8 hours. There was sometimes a mild grogginess effect in the morning but I am and have always been the opposite of a morning person, a definite night owl, so mornings have never worked well for me even when I was a teenager. I didn’t see it as a big problem side effect, certainly didn’t make me dislike mornings any less than I already did for the previous 30 years.
Unfortunately the doctor wouldn’t re-up that prescription, as she didn’t want it to be a long term treatment, so then I was back where I started. And it turns out the work stress wasn’t really the problem. To be honest, it started when I had kids, and amplified as we had 3 kids – that sense of a time bomb that can go off at any time, where there’s this extreme chaos factor that you can’t control in your life, that you are utterly and completely responsible for in every way, and those kids are watching everything you do 24/7, even the bad habits you can’t and don’t see yourself doing – and you can never let your guard down or something terrible is bound to happen. I am fine with being responsible for other humans and I take that responsibility very seriously but it is exhausting, by far the hardest job I’ve ever had. Like, it’s not even close.
I dabbled with internet pharmacies to try to get those prescription sleeping pills without a prescription, but that was a pain and you had to use weirdo sketchy payment methods and I ultimately gave up.
I switched to over the counter sleeping pills, but they have never been very effective on me, a far cry from the prescription ones. I find myself having to use two of them at once to have any effect (that results in actual sleeping), and I don’t like to do that. Also I find I develop a tolerance to them if I take them every night, a handful of times I’ve taken two, then tossed and turned for two hours, and took a third sleeping pill because I was desperate to get to sleep.
I also tried drinking a beer at night before bed. I don’t really like beer, but I taught myself to like it in college because it was too inconvenient not to drink beer a college environment (and drinking hard alcohol gets dangerous real quick; I’ve had only one blackout drunk episode in my life, and it was in college as a result of the “I don’t drink beer, give me the shots” choice). I buy craft style beers with high alcohol content (7% or more) and drink one fairly quickly before bed to maximize the effect. This definitely helps, it takes the edge off my mental state, but it’s also making me fatter than I already am, and since I fundamentally don’t like beer I’d rather take a pill that has the same effect, if I could.
So other than beer (which I don’t want to use), traditional over the counter sleeping pills (which are marginally effective for me), excercise (always a good thing, but hasn’t been a magic bullet for me on sleep)… what else works for you, or can you recommend?