"Emotional Sleeping Disorder"

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There's something I've been noticing about myself, starting last semester:

When I'm happy, I naturally wake up earlier. When I'm sad, I sleep MUCH, MUCH later. Like, when I'm happy, I'll wake up at 8 (today I woke up at three O.o thank god I was able to get back to sleep :-p). BUT, when I'm sad, I can sleep until 3PM.

Does anyone else have this type of thing like I do?

Yes, when I'm happy(which isn't often) I wake up at 6:30am but if I'm sad I can sleep all day. The more depressed I am, the more I don't want to get out of bed.

I sleep more when I'm very stressed. Apparently it's the REM sleep that helps, because I often wake up after a ten-hour sleep with the memory of having had multiple long, vivid dreams (which happen during REM, usually). Most nights you only have four or five, and don't remember most of them; when you wake up remembering two or more dreams, you can be pretty sure your brain's been cranking up the REM.

It's not surprising that your sleep patterns change when you're sad. REM, which seems to have some connection with processing emotions, is something like your internal psychologist, without the pills and superiority. Generally, you will start out the night with short, rather mundane dreams; later on there are wilder associations and longer, more elaborate storylines. That seems to be meant to associate the thoughts and emotions of the day with other things, to fit them into the larger schema of who you are and how you think. (They are also associated with learning. You will dream more if you have been studying a lot, for example.)

If your brain is working in the typical way, the extra time could mean that you're trying to process all the extra emotion. Whether you're successful or not probably depends on whether or not you have the resilience to get through without dipping into depression, which is the point at which dreams stop processing emotion and start just re-playing it.

Ah for those days at university/college when getting up at 8 was an early start!

Not sure about how long I sleep in in the mornings, it's more low long it takes me to fall asleep that worries me. I have always taken hours to fall asleep, whatever mood I'm in, but especially when I'm stressed or depressed. When I'm alright with the world (or it is with me!) I tend to fall asleep in under 30 minutes. One night last week I didn't sleep at all, and felt like sh*t for days afterwards. It also disturbs my wife, my contstant moving around in bed and getting in and out of the bedroom.

I've tried all the bedtime rituals suggested on the internet: counting backwards from 10,000, trying to clear my head (very hard!), listening to music. I get up and sit in the front room if I don't feel sleepy, but end up wide awake till about 3 or 4am.

They say a clear conscience is a good pillow.

No but my medications knock me out so I tend to sleep a lot more than most people.

I keep switching from insomnia to hypersomnia and hardly ever have periods of normal, healthy sleep. it does happen when I'm, as you said, happy i.e. not obsessing.

When I was a teen and in my younger 20's, I was able to sleep pretty much all day if I was given the opportunity.. but now, I am lucky to get 6 hours of sleep, and that is WITH sleeping pills!

[quote="johnners"]Ah for those days at university/college when getting up at 8 was an early start!

I've tried all the bedtime rituals suggested on the internet: counting backwards from 10,000, trying to clear my head (very hard!), listening to music. I get up and sit in the front room if I don't feel sleepy, but end up wide awake till about 3 or 4am.

For myself, I as I also when stressed have a lot of difficulties falling asleep, often because of what I did or did not do and I don't want the next day to come in too fast, when I start realizing that I will not sleep right away or I wake up during the night and cannot fall asleep againg because of my brain is hyperactive I give myself 30 minutes to fall asleep, if not, I have to get up and do some chores that I must do but keep avoiding doing like cleaning a closed or sorting out old piles of bills: I did it a few times (10 minutes after starting doing it I felt a sudden urge to go and sleep) and now just the though of it works very well for me better than any sleeping pill will do!

My big problem is staying asleep; I tend to wake up every 1.5 - 3 hours. And I absolutely hate mornings; I get the "morning dread" most of the time and even when I don't it just feels depressing until mid-afternoon at least. When I don't have to work I rapidly fall into my own schedule of sleeping until 2 or 3 in the afternoon and staying up until 3, 4 or even 5 in the morning.

i will sleep later into the day when i'm depressed or overwhelmed, yes...i seem to flee from daylight when my mood is bad. i think it's just too bright, the world is too loud...so i try to cut the day TIME to a manageable size by sleeping. during severe depressions i will literally "go vampiric" and not emerge from my bed or darkened bedroom until it's dark outside. just went through a spate of that...since i got up before 2pm today after going to bed at around 6am, i think i'm doing fairly well...just a bit askew.

It is rather normal to wake up five times a night or so; most of these awakenings are very brief, long enough to turn over or go to the bathroom and go back to sleep.

The insomnia catch-22: The harder you try to get to sleep, the less likely it is that you will sleep....

I remember reading something when my son was a baby about how it is better not to run immediately to a baby who cries in the night. It said that babies who were allowed to wake, and cry for a short time, would learn how to get themselves back to sleep and this would let them create a habit of waking, then going back to sleep on their own.

It suggested that parents who instantly run to the cot when the baby cries, were doing more harm than good in the long term, as those babies would find it difficult to form sleeping, waking, sleeping etc patterns.

If you have difficulty getting back to sleep it might be interesting to ask your parents how they dealt with you waking in the night as a baby.

Yes, but not all-out crying--that is too much arousal to go back to sleep easily. Picking a baby up for every whimper doesn't make much sense, though, as you'll probably wake it completely when it might have gone back to sleep. The idea that you can teach a baby to sleep through the night by leaving it to cry... well, doesn't work, and it's kind of mean anyway. I'm not a mom, but I did help with my kid sister, so I have a bit of experience.

My mother, incidentally, shared a bed with me when I was an infant. It seems to be rather a good arrangement for both mom and baby, especially while breast-feeding, because nobody has to get up when the baby is hungry. Nowadays they make cribs that clamp onto adult beds, so that the child has both the safety of a regular crib and the nearness of Mother. I haven't seen the SIDS statistics on that arrangement but I would not be surprised if it is lower than either sharing a bed or putting the baby in a crib in the same room.

I didn't sleep through the night. I still don't--I just learned to calm myself and go back to sleep. That was possible, most nights, by age three. By the time I had my first teen growth spurt, the awakenings were short, as they ought to be; now, my main trouble is with a sleep pattern that can't seem to settle into a steady rhythm.

i cried constantly and was a "touch-me-not" baby...i sounded like a cat, my mother said...but didn't sleep as much as a cat. annoying sound, all the time. nobody was sleeping, so by the time i was four months old i was on phenobarbitol so the rest of the family could sleep...this was 1970, i'm not sure this would fly today. my mother somehow managed to KEEP me on either pheno or paregoric until i was nine...for some reason when a teacher recommended me for gifted and my IQ was revealed it was more okay that i was weird.

is it any surprise to anyone that i have trouble getting to sleep, staying asleep and maintaining a regular sleep pattern?

No not the all-out crying - that's different altogether. Yeah, and controlled crying can be pretty extreme, some recommend you just let the baby cry for however long it takes. Horrific! The baby just gets more and more distressed.

If you're around a baby a lot, you get to know what the different cries signify. In pain, or ill, are definately different and need immediate attention.

Not to the same extent, but yeah, I am similar.