Insomnia

[Endless]

I can't sleep. I literally cannot sleep.

For quite awhile I've only been getting 2-4 hours a night, usually 3. I have no trouble falling asleep. I can't stay asleep. I wake up around 2am.

I have trazodone. I take 3 of those at night. I still wake up aroud 2am.

Next step, the sleep doc told me to stay awake, take the trazodone at 1:30am and go to sleep at 2am to adjust my body's clock. So I did. For the first time I could not fall asleep. No sleep at all.

I think most of you have been long-term sleep deprived before and know what it feels like. I am beyond exhausted now. I am a zombie. This has been 1-3 years, getting worse all the time, and I just can't take it anymore. Something has to give.

The sleep doctor isn't helping, and I have no idea what to do. I've tried all of the usual "sleep hygiene" things, plus herbs, teas, drugs. Nothing is working.

It's not totally the Lamictal. I had a problem with sleep before that. Part of it is bad headaches. Pain meds don't work on them. I don't think that's the total reason I can't sleep, either.

Your ideas on this would be great.

 

[Aicila]

I don't really know any good words of advice. I am just now dealing with this and haven't had any real problems in the past. My problems have stemmed strictly from siezure meds. The Restoril and Ambien they have given me seem to work so far, but I can only take them every once in a while. I do get headaches/migraines too. I know I need sleep to keep the headaches down, I know I need the meds to keep the siezures down, I know the meds will keep me awake, I know I need the other meds to keep me asleep, I know I can't take those meds all the time because I will become addicted, I know if I don't take those meds I won't sleep, I know if I don't sleep I will get headaches... vicious cycle.
There is a guy I work with and he takes some XR sleep med. Maybe you can look into that. It sounds like that might be something worth while. I have the same sort of insomnia as you. I wake up several times a night. Except I don't feel tired at first. I don't usually go to sleep without an Ambien until midnight or so.
Either way, I hope you are able to get some sleep soon. I know how it feels to be completely exhausted. Take care of yourself. At least go lay down and rest.

 

[drarvindr]

Hi . Sorry you've been suffering lately
re: your insomnia, The usual sleep hygiene things have been shown to as effective as drugs , so just in case you forgot /your doctor didn't tell you , here's the list ( forgive any repetition , just wanted to put it out there)
1.No Napping, No booze, No caffeine/nicotine.
2. try to avoid bright lights in the room when you sleep. try to make the room as dark as possible to ensure to set your body clock to the right time
3. avoid heavy suppers / lots of water at night
4.Don't stare at your clock when going to sleep
5.don't go to bed to "try" to sleep. it won't work. get dog-tired and then go to bed

As far as drugs are concerned , trazodone is associated with a rapid development of tolerance ( stops working very soon) .Sedative hypnotics are your best bet , especially long half-life ones like zolpidem ER or eszopiclone. They will reduce waking after sleep onset. the downside is that you'll be more drowsy during the day and this may be detrimental to your functioning ; also doctors tend to be skimpy when prescribing hypnotics because of their high abuse potential and interactions with other drugs ( not sure about lamictal - will look it up and get back to u).
Another option is to tackle your worry. As you develop more and more insomnia , you start to worry whether you'll ever sleep again , which in itself makes sleep less likely. You may want to see a behavioral therapist for CBT ( cognitive behavioral therapy) to stop the worry and help you sleep peacefully.
Hope this helps ,
Arvind

 

[Endless]

Thanks, everybody.

I've done all the sleep hygeine items and more. I think my insomia is because of something else physical, because I have all this stuff going on with my body right now. This is just one more. What that something else that could be causing it I have no idea.

Awhile back I took Ambien XR and it worked somewhat, but I stopped taking it. It was because I was a zombie not because of lack of sleep, but because of being drugged. I'm desperate so I'm going to haul out the ambien again, maybe just for tonight. We'll see how it does.

Lamictal makes the problem worse, but I'm not willing to quit taking it. All the others had even worse side effects or didn't completely control my seizures. This has been the most acceptable of the lot, if you call severe insomnia and some thinking/memory problems acceptable. But the seizures are under control. Yahooo.

If ambien solved my problem again, that would be great. now could someone pull these headaches out of my brain?


Drarvindr: Are hynotics habit forming/addictive?

 

[jyearta]

Magnesium help me alot with my imsomnia.

 

[drarvindr]

Dear endless,
Yes , hypnotics tend to be habit forming over time. you have to be disciplined while taking them . You need to be disciplined while using them , and ensure that's it's you that uses the drugs and not vice-versa.

 

[elizzza811]

I completely understand your dilemma, but a lot of the advise Arvind gave you didn't work for me either, whether it's been 'shown to be as effective as drugs' or not in a clinical setting. You already mentioned that you'd already tried all these things anyway. I highly doubt too that your worrying over this has anything to do with it either - what else are you going to be thinking about at 3:00am when the rest of the continent is sleeping?

I don't really have any advice for you...I'm up between 2-4am every night too, many nights with irrepressable teeth-clenching and drenching sweats. I woke up at 2:45am last night and sweat so heavily that the hand lotion I'd applied before I went to bed actually liquified. Maybe my Lamictal isn't doing all it should either?

 

[Rag]

I think it's likely that much of the insomnia is caused by something more nebulous than can be easily solved by any of the standard sleep regimens, or can be blamed on drugs or such obvious causes as stress caused by health issues, etc. My impression is that for some epilepsy sufferers, (probably quite a large proportion) an increased susceptibility to insomnia may be due to the same underlying brain dysfunctions that cause the seizures themselves, but is not necessarily dependent on actual seizure activity. This is to say that there is one manifestation of unusual brain functioning in epilepsy sufferers, a lowered seizure threshold, and another manifestation of the same disordered functioning in some of them, increased susceptibility to insomnia/unsound sleep - but as they only share a common cause and manifest through different neurological processes, a treatment that is effective for supressing seizures is not necessarily going to help associated insomnia, and vice-versa.

I've done enough research into this issue to be fairly sure that for me insomnia and erratic and unsound sleeping, often occuring in bouts of days or weeks at a time before it (hopefully) settles down again into something like a regular or healthy pattern, are just something that I will probably have to put up with. Sleep difficulties not otherwise explainable seems to be a well recognised complication of epilepsy, particularly the focal epilepsy conditions such as TLE, for some reason. So far as I can make out the consensus in the research community is that even when other factors are controlled for, there seems to be a significant increase in susceptibilty to a variety of sleep problems among epilepsy sufferers that appears to be due simply to the fact, of itself, that they have epilepsy. This is in addition to the effect of nocturnal seizures, in those who suffer them. As someone who seems to get them exclusively, I can confirm that nocturnal seizures, even minor ones, are very good at causing disrupted, fragmented, unrefreshing, and generally weird sleep. I couldn't find the articles I was looking for, but there's some pretty good information in this one on both the effect of nocturnal seizures on sleep and general sleep problems of epilepsy sufferers:

http://columbiasleep.org/researchdocs/Epilepsy%20and%20sleep%20disturbance.pdf

 

[elizzza811]

I couldn't have said it any better myself...

 

[C0urt]

off subject.....

does anyone else see the dr nick avatar and can't help but read the post in those voice.
I'm sorry.

 

[Nakamova]

Yep, I do that too C0urt!

 

[Loopy Lou]

I'm so sorry you're still not sleeping Endless - i remember all too well when that was me. I just could not sleep for any length of time. I think it was a combination of vimpat and stress.

Tegretol worked for me. Now i'm probably the opposite of insomniac. Doesn't help much with seizures, but my god i sleep a lot.