Sleep!

After an awful night of "sleep" I thought I might say something important:

Working myself to exhaustion DOES NOT make me sleepy. I won't get tired enough to sleep by simply doing more work to "tire myself out."

A healthy person should get more tired by extra work, so it's very easy for healthy people to suggest to those of us with insomnia or sleep issues to simply wear our selves out to make us tired. They mean well, but they don't understand. I worked 18 hours on my feet this past week, attended a large event where I had to stand for an hour, went for a couple of walks with a friend and my husband, did extra chores around the house, hosted a dinner at my house for my parents, and more. I did double what I'm normally capable of this week, and I'm very much paying for it now. I'm very tired, in desperate need of recovery. But I'm not sleepy.

I usually start to wake up and feel better at about 10 pm, when I feel like my body decides to start producing energy, finally. It doesn't matter how hard of a day it was, how little sleep I got the night before, or how tired I feel up to 10 pm. My brain turns on at night, and I often feel like I could get up and do an easy Xbox Fitness program. Sometimes I actually do have to at least do some jumping jacks and lift a few weights in order to get ready for bed, otherwise I can feel too restless. Where's that energy during the day when I need it!?

Last night was terrible. Absolutely annoying. After dinner I used my far infrared sauna for an hour, which is very calming, usually, and then drank water with my doctor's CalmING powder that is designed to calm anxiety and adrenaline. A little later I drank Nighty Night tea, a tea for inducing sleep. It had zero effect on me, when it normally does bring a wave of a tired feeling. Then I rubbed in my nightly dose of progesterone cream, which tends to have a relaxed calming effect. I then took my sleep pills: an herbal and magnesium blend from my doctor, a ziziphus blend from my doctor, phosphatidylserine with choline and inositol, organically grown valerian root, Organic India's Peaceful Sleep, and 6 mg of melatonin.  Multiple pills of each of these. This combo is usually just enough to knock me out so I can sleep, and once I'm asleep I typically sleep well on a normal night. Last night, all of these pills didn't work. They didn't phase me.

I laid in bed for hours with very agitated thoughts, high anxiety, and fibromyalgia flares flowing through my legs and arms. My thoughts drifted in and out of dreams, so I could tell my body was trying to sleep, but I kept waking up from the annoyance of my dreams. The "dreams" were very high strung, full of problems, social tension issues, anxiety about getting somewhere on time, etc. I tossed and turned a lot, and at several points considered getting up and avoiding the bed for the rest of the night to avoid the torment.

The worst part was feeling my heart beating with such high intensity ALL night long. Every time I woke up I could feel my heart hitting the mattress like a punching bag. I practiced some deep breathing techniques to calm my heart, but it actually only made my heart beat harder, like I was working out.

Please understand, I spend a lot of time and money on remedies to get me to sleep. If I don't take enough of them, my adrenal glands won't shut off at night and keep me awake. I must overpower my adrenals to sleep.

But last night wasn't a normal night. This was PMS induced, and therefore there may not have been any combination of pills that would have worked for me.

The problem with PMS and my menstrual cycle is that my level of stress through the month seems to have a direct consequence on how intense it's going to be. The more I take on and exhaust myself, the more agitation and irritability during PMS. This month I was too active - I had way more stress than I wanted, more hours at work than I should take, and too many side projects I shouldn't have worried about. I'm paying harshly for it, and I cannot allow this to be normal. I MUST back off and lessen my level of stress.

Let me leave you with this article about the dangers of lacking sleep. I can't stress enough how important sleep is to our entire life - we cannot afford to skip it to get more work done in our life:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sleep-newzzz/201603/the-social-and-behavioral-costs-sleeplessness?utm_source=FacebookPost&utm_medium=FBPost&utm_campaign=FBPost