Photo by bee boxes.
It starts like this: I crawl into bed, but just as I’m about to fall asleep, I get this tingly feeling in my lower legs. It grows and deepens until I feel like a million tiny bugs are crawling around under my skin. Twitching and wiggling helps relieve the antsiness, but it also wakes up my boyfriend and makes it impossible for me to fall asleep. So I get up and walk around and eventually read a book or watch a movie or play on the internet until I’m so tired I’m half-asleep in my chair. Only then–usually somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 or 5 A.M.–can I actually fall into my bed and pass out without fighting the overwhelming urge to squirm.
Fact: Restless legs syndrome is the one medical condition that people inevitably single out when trying to prove that doctors over-pathologize normal, everyday conditions in order to sell more medication. Restless legs? they scoff. I mean, come on. How does that affect your health in any way? How bad can it possibly be?
Fact: People who say things like this are idiots.
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I’ve been trying to fix my sleep schedule. I sleep too little, too much, at the wrong time of day. This has been a problem for me since high school, when my parents were alarmed that, despite the fact that I could never get up in the mornings and spent seven hours at school, two at track practice and two more at play rehearsals, I was never exhausted enough to fall asleep before 1 or 2 A.M. They took me to a doctor who mentioned it might delayed sleep phase syndrome–a fancy name for the fact that my night-owliness was not personal preference or laziness but a result of my circadian rhythms being inherently fucked–but mostly just told me to lay off the caffeinated soda. My sleep patterns only deteriorated once I got to college–during my freshman year of college, they gradually evolved into two four or five hour naps, one just after dinner and the other around 5 or 6 A.M., depending what time I had to be up for class. I pulled regular all-nighters, regardless of whether or not I had a paper to write or an exam to study for. My sleep patterns only normalized when I was waiting tables 30 hours a week in addition to going to school. Running around on campus and at work for twelve hours a day, I wore myself out so much that I could finally fall asleep as soon as my homework was done.
My stress level has been really high lately. I’m trying to modify my daily routines–sleeping, eating, drinking, running–trying to mold them into patterns that decrease my anxiety instead of upping it. But I’m starting to think I have the deck stacked against me here.
3 Comments
May 18, 2009 at 12:59 am
Oh man, as I have well documented on my blog I suffer from similar sleep issues. If I fall asleep before 3am, it is an early night. Similarly, my wake up times have crept from 10am to 11am to noon and no matter that I can work from noon to 9p if it suits me, I just don’t feel productive when it is usually 4am or later when I go to sleep and at least noon when I wake up and 3 or 4pm when I want a nap so bad I have to leave the house to restrain myself.
I try to train myself to sleep earlier, even take sleep meds. Nothing helps
May 22, 2009 at 1:25 am
I can’t even remember how I made it through high school when I had to wake up at 7 everyday. I have blocked my pre-college years out of my brain, obviously.
June 14, 2009 at 9:52 pm
[...] In accordance with my vow to re-design my sleeping schedule, I’ve been limiting my post-midnight computer time. It turns out I can only write when [...]