I have a mental block when it comes to getting to sleep. I can be absolutely exhausted, barely have the energy to brush my teeth and take a shower and as soon as I put my head on my pillow I am wide awake. The last time I can say that I truly fell asleep the way that my dog can in something like 2 minutes or less was a time that I was so jet-lagged from flying from Thailand to NYC and my friend insisted that we go out for beers right when I got there.
When I eventually got him to let me go home I was probably fast asleep within 30 seconds of closing my eyes. In my mind that was absolutely delightful.
I am tired all day long too and therefore I find it very difficult to get motivated to do even the smallest of things such as leave my house in order to obtain food to eat. I force myself to exercise every day in the evenings in the hope that this exertion is going to somehow help me to accomplish sleep at night. When I first return from said runs, I feel like I could do that and sometimes I even give it a go despite the fact that it is merely 7pm or something like that.
It Never Works
I do not have a TV in my bedroom, I do not ever look at my phone in bed and go down some sort of YouTube wormhole that engages my brain, I don't really have much involvement in social media. I am not stressed about my life and am actually very happy about what my work is, where I live, and how my financial situation is. I am NOT stressed. I just can't sleep.
There are a few things that I can use in order to counteract this and one of them is to get really drunk. Of course I can sleep after I do that but of course hangovers are not very much fun and this is a surefire way to get one of those.
The other way is to take tablets such as Valium and read a book for a while. This works sometimes. It really is a bit of a nightmare to sit there in bed, trying to meditate and focus on some white noise in order to eventually drift off to sleep.
My body hates me so much that there is a recurring dream that I do have often that even though I eventually did achieve slumber, I dream about not being able to get to sleep. I DREAM ABOUT NOT BEING ABLE TO SLEEP.
Maybe I need to get involved in a Fight Club instead of focusing so heavily on bowling and PS4? I fear as though that, and any other form of exercise is not the problem here since I exercise at least half an hour every damn day.
The thing that gets me is that this is not a problem that I have had my whole life it only began some time after college when my real work life began. I slept quite nicely in college although to be fair booze was a factor in a lot of those encounters as well.
People keep recommending herbal remedies or certain types of tea but I was always under the impression that tea has caffeine in it and if i EVER have caffeine past say, 7pm, I can forget about any sort of shut eye for many many hours afterwards. The crazy thing about this is that coffee fails to wake me up in the morning as well. It simply seems I can not catch a break.
I did some searching online and found out that I am not alone as far as dreaming about not being able to sleep is concerned and it is actually a recognized medical condition (or at least that is what the shrinks say, they went to school for a long time so I will just take their word for it.) and this condition is called "False Awakenings" and can actually be very damaging to the quality of sleep that your brain actually accomplishes.
Doctors remedy this by prescribing more powerful sedatives which to me seems like a terrible idea because then I wouldn't be able to accomplish sleep without the drug - or so I imagine.
There was a drug I got prescribed just ONE of a while back by a friend of the family doctor. Take one of those F**King things that you WILL sleep... and you will sleep very well. However it is meant to be habit forming and that is all I need in my life... another bad habit.
I'm just curious if any of you out there in internet land have experienced False Awakenings before?
Thankfully I work from home and don't really have a schedule that I have to keep but I do get very frustrated at night when I am staring at the ceiling, especially when my dog pal is able to lay down next to me and be snoring within 90 seconds of lying her head down....
This little darling is ready for a snooze basically 24-hours a day. Sometimes she gets so tired just looking at me eat that she starts to nod off. I'm so jealous.