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CindySara
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21 Dec 2012, 6:57 pm

Ever since January, we 9twin sisters) have been suffering from worsened insomnia/ We used to go to sleep around 8 and wake at about 3:30, but now we got to sleep around 7-7:30 and wake at 2;00 am. Basically, night activities are out of the question. It seems like the world revolves around night activities. no one ever wants to get together in the morning-- it's always 7 pm! Does anyone else get frustrated by the preponderance of night activities or does anyone else have problems going out at night? We've always been sort of reluctant to go out at night. Does anyone else have as alien of biorhythms as we have? Even among other misfits, we feel like misfits, with the weird schedules the insomnia forces us to keep.


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Fnord
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21 Dec 2012, 7:03 pm

Trust me, there is little going on after 8:00p that would be worth going out for.

I live in the Anaheim area, where we have numerous theme parks, night clubs, movie theaters, restaurants ... I've been to all of them, and they are never really exciting after the first visit.


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YellowBanana
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21 Dec 2012, 7:06 pm

You don't have insomnia. You just have a different sleep schedule to the majority.

Insomnia is when you don't get enough sleep - can be due to initial difficulty getting to sleep, waking in the night, or waking early. I'm "lucky" to suffer from all three and without medication I'm lucky if I get 3 hours sleep a night. Have had several sleep medications in the past and they have all helped to some extent, but right now I love my 200mg trazodone (puts me to sleep in about 15 minutes and keeps me asleep until my alarm goes off, plus helps my depression & anxiety).

If you want to get your sleep schedule more "in line" with the majority, then shift your bed time later by half an hour (maybe a week at a time?) ... you clearly don't have trouble sleeping so it's up to you what kind of rhythm you want to set.


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CindySara
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22 Dec 2012, 8:04 am

YellowBanana wrote:
You don't have insomnia. You just have a different sleep schedule to the majority.

Insomnia is when you don't get enough sleep - can be due to initial difficulty getting to sleep, waking in the night, or waking early. I'm "lucky" to suffer from all three and without medication I'm lucky if I get 3 hours sleep a night. Have had several sleep medications in the past and they have all helped to some extent, but right now I love my 200mg trazodone (puts me to sleep in about 15 minutes and keeps me asleep until my alarm goes off, plus helps my depression & anxiety).

If you want to get your sleep schedule more "in line" with the majority, then shift your bed time later by half an hour (maybe a week at a time?) ... you clearly don't have trouble sleeping so it's up to you what kind of rhythm you want to set.


Thanks for your words of wisdom :). We're actually on Trazodone too plus Klonopin, but we take really low doses, like 50 mg of trazodone and .25 of Klonopin. Maybe we should up the trazodone. We actually are "lucky" enough to suffer from all three problems too (not sure which problem is the worst for us, it varies from night to night....). We're taking at least 75 mg of trazodone tonight, though. It can't hurt!


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YellowBanana
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22 Dec 2012, 9:09 am

CindySara wrote:
YellowBanana wrote:
You don't have insomnia. You just have a different sleep schedule to the majority.

Insomnia is when you don't get enough sleep - can be due to initial difficulty getting to sleep, waking in the night, or waking early. I'm "lucky" to suffer from all three and without medication I'm lucky if I get 3 hours sleep a night. Have had several sleep medications in the past and they have all helped to some extent, but right now I love my 200mg trazodone (puts me to sleep in about 15 minutes and keeps me asleep until my alarm goes off, plus helps my depression & anxiety).

If you want to get your sleep schedule more "in line" with the majority, then shift your bed time later by half an hour (maybe a week at a time?) ... you clearly don't have trouble sleeping so it's up to you what kind of rhythm you want to set.


Thanks for your words of wisdom :). We're actually on Trazodone too plus Klonopin, but we take really low doses, like 50 mg of trazodone and .25 of Klonopin. Maybe we should up the trazodone. We actually are "lucky" enough to suffer from all three problems too (not sure which problem is the worst for us, it varies from night to night....). We're taking at least 75 mg of trazodone tonight, though. It can't hurt!


If the trazodone is making you sleep, and you want to adjust your sleep patterns to fit with the majority, then take the trazodone (and/or other sleep meds) later at night. Your description says you sleep about 7 or 8 hours a night, so whatever you're taking is working. You just need to adjust the timings (which won't be easy, but there's no reason why you can't do it a step at a time if being available in the evening is important to you).

I typically take my trazodone at about 10.30 and sound asleep by 11.00pm and I wake about 7am. If I took it at 6pm (with dinner, for example), I have no doubt I'd be asleep by 6.30pm and waking at about 2.30am.

A typical trazodone dose for sleep is 50mg. Mine is so high because it's other properties are required (I'm resistant to most anti depressants and anti anxiety drugs - I'm also on diazepam but that's for taking PRN when I have "warning" that I will harm myself). There's talk of me going up to 300mg traz.

Other sleep meds I've had are promethezine (a sedating antihistamine) which worked pretty good (and I now buy it OTC to have something in case I run out of my prescribed meds) and zopiclone (which didn't work so well).


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