Up all night

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When you can't sleep all night long, what is preventing you from sleeping?

When you are up all night long on purpose, what are you doing?

How often are you up all night long?

Sometimes I can't sleep because I have too much anxiety over what my dreams are going to be like.

The last time I stayed up all night intentionally was probably due to something trauma related. I haven't purposely stayed up all night in a lonnggg time.

My thoughts
My bladder
My sinuses
If there's a song going round and round in my head on a loop
The noisy neighbours (yes I do use earplugs but I still sometimes hear them)


Scrolling through Facebook and WP on my phone, and doing writing


Most nights. Sometimes I take an antisickness pill as a sedative because one of its side effects is extreme drowsiness. The doctor won't seem to prescribe me sleeping tablets, and the over-the-counter drugs or other herbal remedies don't seem to work.

When I am up all night its either because I missed my usual window of time for falling asleep. Sometimes its anxiety or intrusive thoughts. If it does feel like I am not going to fall asleep or get back to sleep, I listen to a book in bed. That way I can at least rest my body for the next day.

Pain, anxiety, noise, jet lag, and/or too much light.Playing World of Tanks or other video game.About 2 or 3 nights every few weeks.

The short of it is that stress, and especially prolonged stress will keep me from sleeping. That's the main culprit. Health or noise issues can play a part. But for chronic sleep issues...oh yeah. Stress.

What I'm doing depends on how long I've been having sleep issues. If it's just the one night, I'll likely sit around and play a game or games or kill time on the internet. If it's more recurring, I might just say to hell with it and get up and do what I'd normally do during the day. If it's been going on for more than a week, I'm so exhausted and out of my head that I just try to not do anything too stupid while having mini mental breakdowns in my living room.

I'm actually not up all night all that often anymore. It still happens sometimes. My most recent bout of insomnia started back in mid December and got so bad that by the end of January I had a week where I got 11 hours of sleep total for the whole week. I was pissed. That was a bad one though. The bad ones only seem to happen under severe stress, like divorce, trauma, or non stop stressful things back to back for months. So for those, not too often. Just regular miss a nights sleep here and there stuff, maybe once or twice a month or two.

I feel compelled to mention, I don't stay up all night on purpose. I actually really love to sleep. I try to do that whenever possible... at nights in the day as a nap...it's all good. I will never turn down a chance to sleep if I can. I take my sleep very seriously and need quite a bit of it to be okay.

Usually a "noisy head" = far too many random thoughts or too many thoughts on a current project. Fortunately quite rare now owing to meds but if it gets too bad I get up and (next question).

Either working on an organ piece (strictly headphones only) or editing my photos. Or programming some utility or other: parsing system log files can be fun!

Maybe two or three times a month, often with long stretches in-between though.

Anxiety

Reading, playing my keyboard, or listening to music.

I struggle with insomnia most nights. I don’t usually pull all-nighters, though.