Any adults still struggle with sleeping?

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I've been an awful sleeper since birth. When I was a small child, I would end up staying up until 2-4 in the morning, even on school nights, every day no matter how hard my parents tried. My mother also had to sleep with me until I was 11 and if she tried to leave in the middle of the night, then I would instantly wake up. Hopefully nobody gets the idea that it's my parents fault for enabling my sleep issues, because they did all they could (I don't think I'll get these kinds of assumptions here, but just an in case because it's stuff you hear all too often in the real world).

I believe it was a regulation issue then and still is now. It doesn't always register to me that I need to go to bed until I can hardly keep my thoughts straight nor my eyes open. I have found it entirely impossible to maintain any sort of typical sleep schedule and believe me, it's not for a lack of trying! Even when I have an everyday schedule of everything else in life, my sleep will still not be normal. Alarms don't work because I sleep right through them, no caffeine doesn't work, etc etc etc.

I'm not really looking for advice because I don't think there is anything I could do at this point besides medications and I'm not going that route for such a basic human need (afterall, I don't have trouble fulfilling it. It just doesn't happen at convenient times). I was just wondering if there are any other adults who still struggle with this big time?

Oh yeah, I understand the insomnia boat you're in right now. The other day I posted this:

Yes, I relate to a lot of what you said. As a baby I had to be rocked to sleep or driven around in the car, or else I'd just lay there wide awake, not crying but just awake. I never could sleep during nap times at school or preschool so I'd just lay there wide awake.

A lot of my problem is I think is that I can't just force myself to sleep like apparently some people can. I heard it from a lot of people, "Just make yourself go to bed". I don't understand how that can be possible, I can't ever get to sleep unless I'm so tired that I can't keep my eyes open, or almost that tired, and I have tried before, but I can't. I feel annoyed lying awake like this, it feels like I'm just wasting time because my mind is racing too much to sleep, and I end up doing other things like reading or doing things on my computer until I'm super tired. Usually I do use this time to do productive things, but unfortunately it is usually after 3 am that I actually get tired, and most days I have to get up at 7 or earlier. I never seem to get tired at the same time or even around the same time. I also have slept through every alarm I've ever used, no matter how loud. I've had someone pull me up to a sitting position and shake me for 30 seconds while asleep, and I only knew they did this because they told me about it when I woke up over an hour later.

The only thing I never tried was medication. I did try melatonin and got mixed results, but most of the time I didn't feel any more tired, so I don't think it helped all that much. It made my eyes feel a bit tired I think, but my mind and body was totally awake, and then the tired eyes went away in an hour. I really don't know what to do about it, I've tried getting on a schedule, taking out caffiene (which never affects my tiredness anyway), switching alarms, using the ones that make you do puzzles to shut them up, etc. I don't even wake up for the alarms half the time, or I don't remember turning them off. If I do actually wake up and turn the alarm off, I still feel extremely tired, and will either accidentally fall back asleep right away or be tired for hours.

I don't want to use meds but at this point I might just have to go that route, because I keep sleeping through my alarms and getting to work late. Luckily they need me, so they won't fire me unless I do something really stupid, but at some point they might get fed up with it; plus I don't like calling them every morning to tell them I'm going to be 15 to 30 minutes late. I'd rather take something for it if it will help, at least for now.

You can ask your doctor about taking Melatonin. Its not a pharmaceutical drug but a natural hormone the body produces. It's literally the sleep hormone.

Melatonin works by saturation... it crosses the blood brain barrier and accumulates in the brain until it reaches a point where your brain starts to feel sleepy and eventually you fall asleep.

Recent research realized Melatonin is also the key component the brain uses to make the blood-brain barrier able to allow cell-waste accumulated from the whole day (which was trapped inside the barrier unable to get out) to exit the brain.... this is the very reason why we need to sleep btw.

If that cell-waste isn't flushed out it becomes toxic and starts to show as symptoms: insomnia, reduced ability to concentrate/focus, mental exhaustion, irritability and at high toxicity, hallucinations, violent behavior and cognitive dissonance. Essentially all the symptoms of lack of sleep short to long term.

Ask your doctor if you can try Melatonin. It should be available off the counter but its always best to consult the doctor first.

As a child I apparently catapulted myself out of bed on a regular basis, mere moments after falling asleep, which made getting a good night's rest slightly difficult. Nowadays I'd say it takes me about an hour of lying in a dark room, staring at a featureless ceiling to eventually snooze. A cup of chamomile tea helps a little bit.

yup... life long for me as well. my bio parents were often mad at me because i would only sleep for a few hours at a time, even when i was a baby.
now i have a difficult time with sleeping and staying awake. its a really confusing mix that happens (sometimes i cant sleep but am dead miserable with tiredness. where sometimes i cant stay awake, i have literally fallen asleep standing up before). i also used to sleep walk when i was 2-6yrs old. 2 and 3 in the morning seems to be a common time that i wake up -when i do during the night). i also never go into the REM cycle sleep stage (found out through extensive sleep studies and eeg's and day studies and other 4 letter things that i cant remember it was like Mstr or something like that of the daytime studies). through a weeks period i can have insomnia and hypersomnia. (not at the same time, but its a common thing that happens throughout my week.)
it never fails though, when i wake up between 2-5am i wont be able to get back to sleep until 7(which is when its time for me to get up, and thats be atleast since highschool.

I wasn't too good with sleeping when I was a kid. It would take me ages to fall asleep, and I mean ages.

But as an adult I have no problem with sleeping. Often it takes me less than two minutes to fall asleep at night, and I wake up at a reasonable time in the morning and realised I had a good night's sleep. That's generally how my sleep cycle goes.

But a lot of people I know say they don't sleep well, especially older people. They say they toss and turn most nights, some even get up to make a cup of tea if they can't sleep. I hope I never get like that, as I do love sleeping.

What works for me is that I don't go to the bedroom unless I'm going to bed. I don't sit there and read, play games, ... . It is for sleeping. And changing clothes.

I used to have trouble sleeping and would toss and turn for hours. Once I started just sleeping in there and nothing else, I am often asleep a minute or two after I get in bed. When I wake up, I get up and go elsewhere.

I really have to fight the urge to fall asleep when I go into the bedroom to change clothes.

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I used to get by on about 2 hours of sleep a night, but not any more. If I don't get at least 6 or 7 hours of sleep now, I end up taking naps in the afternoon.

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One thing that I'm doing more and more is a first sleep - second sleep pattern. This pattern used to be very common in the days before things like electric lighting and street lights. When it got dark, it was pretty much time to go to sleep. People would often sleep four or five hours and then wake up for an hour or two before going back to sleep until time to get up in the morning. The time awake was reportedly a good time to go to eat a snack, read, have sex, go to the bathroom, or even visit neighbors!

I used to exist on very little sleep when I was younger.

From about the age of 30 I learned to get myself into a proper routine of going to bed at a regular time and getting up at a regular time. I find it helps.

It usually takes me about an hour to get to sleep.

I wake up quite a lot in the night but I do persevere and I generally get about 7 to 8 hours at least 4 nights out of 7.

I never really slept as a kid.

My meds made me sleep too much.

Now I'm going off and I'm up a lot again.

I also like to lay in bed alot during the day on computer and sitting around

Yeah, and don't remember too many struggles with sleep as a kid, except I always felt my 'bed time' was too early and wanted to stay up later....but even so I still thought staying up till 12:00am was like some difficult thing to accomplish....staying up till midnight on new-years was still a big deal for me as a kid. I know when I was in middle/highschool and parents didn't really enforce the bed time thing I'd stay up pretty late, for a while I think I was getting around 2 hours of sleep a night.

Anyways I do have trouble with sleeping, usually wont get to bed till around 12am, and I don't supplement this by sleeping in or anything usually, I can stay up till like 5 and still wake up at 8 or 9 if not earlier. If I really have not been getting enough sleep and need to then I have trazodone up to 150 mg if needed which will knock me out and I don't have to worry about doing weird stuff in a half asleep/part awake state like with that ambien stuff I've heard of.

Yeah, of course. I've pulled all-nighters involuntarily. Melatonin helps, but only to a point. I'm not sure how it works but I think the autistic brain might not have enough of it or something. I don't know.

I'm not quite an adult yet but I turn 18 next year.

I've struggled with sleep for as long as I can remember. When I was younger, about 7 to 10 years old, my mum used to have to sit with me for me to fall asleep otherwise I couldn't. Now I have to read a certain book to fall asleep. I don't usually have a problem falling asleep but staying asleep is the issue. I wake up during the night most times when I fall asleep and struggle to get back to sleep, and feel tired in the morning. I woke up at five this morning but the earliest I've woken up before is probably half past two in the morning. I'm a light sleeper but if I'm very tired, I'll sleep through anything.

calstar2, you mention about sleeping through alarms in the morning? I have a special alarm clock called the "Sonic Boom" which has a vibrating pad attached to it that you place underneath your pillow and it will judder at the set time of the alarm. It also has a very loud alarm (which can be switched off so that only the pad vibrates). It's designed for heavy sleepers and deaf people.