Hello everyone. Here is my story. Any advice is very much appreciated during this tough time in my life.
In mid-September 2016 a rather stressful event occurred at work and this was followed by a few mornings of waking up too early and ending up exhausted throughout the day. A bit of anxiety if you will.
My normal sleep time has always been 10p-6a, but I would be waking up around 5am instead. After about a week I began to get very frustrated, and by the beginning of October I had started in with driving myself insane. I purchased new pillows which did nothing, and that was just the start. Over the next two months it would continue… I bought a white noise machine. Tried melatonin. Got blood work done. Began drinking sleepy time and other herbal teas before bed. Blacked out my room as much as possible. Bought a brand new pair of sheets. Bought a book on how to sleep better. And lastly, read every piece of internet research possible on what could be wrong with me.
Throughout these two months, the early wakeups progressed to horrible 3am wakeups. When these would occur I’d fall back asleep after about a half hour or so, then sometimes wake up at the 6am alarm, sometimes 5am again. I was a walking zombie at work, and was becoming physically ill. My life was a fog and consumed by what I now felt was a sleep disorder. I canceled plans, gave up on dating, stopped going to the gym and missed out on other things, quite frankly Bc I was too shot to function properly.
Finally at the end of November I had enough and went to a sleep doctor and told him I couldn’t fix whatever was going on. He told me he thinks I had “situational insomnia” from the work event and that triggered anxiety and my sleep problems. He did say that it should not be lasting too much longer. He said its been 2.5 months. If its 5-6 months in, then there’s a bigger problem. He also briefly mentioned that sleep apnea was a possibility, but I insisted that's unlikely as this bad sleeping began after the stressful event. It should be very much noted that within a month after the mid September stressful event, everything was fine at my job again and there was no more stress.
But anyway, as hard as it was to believe that 90% of nights like CLOCKWORK I was waking up around 3am, I did feel somewhat anxious in general, and accepted what he told me. It was just hard to believe that a person’s brain, mine especially, could work like this and affect my sleep like it was supposedly doing to me almost EVERY single night, and ruining my life.
One week later I had a revelation. Between what he told me and after reading up on some new material I found online, it seemed as if the answer was simple… STOP worrying so much. Accept the problem for right now. Things like that. Immediately, something began happening. I began sleeping better. The 3am wakeups stopped and soon it would only be the early morning wakeups. I built on this and shortly after, by December 9th 2016 or so, I was sleeping normally again!! The rest of 2016 went by fine, with me not believing how mentally sick I’d made MYSELF over my insomnia. It turned out, at least I thought, that my nonstop worrying was only fueling my anxiety and messing with my brain.
This was until around New Years. January 1st and 2nd to be exact, when a few bad nights of sleep had returned. 5am wakeups that left me foggy again for the first time in three weeks. I was upset, and wondering why in the world this returned. Somehow, someway, before I knew it, by mid January, I was back in the cycle of bad sleeping/insomnia. By the end of January, the 3am horrors had even returned. I was devastated. Quickly, I told myself to stop worrying and that was what caused this in the beginning. But something just wasn’t working this time. Now in February, it seemed as if my anxiety returned and decided it wasn’t going to leave as easily this time. This was a horror for me. Zombie days returned, and my lifeless self would get home from work plopping on the bed trying to figure out how to get rid of this FOREVER, but at the same time trying to tell my brain to just relax. Back to the internet I went, but this time there were no melatonin pills or sleepy tea or any of that junk. I beat this naturally before and I knew I could do it again, or could i?
It was now already the end of February, and just like that, for another two months, I was sleeping poorly again. Finally I decided to try the one thing I never seemed to try and that was going on a strict sleep routine (something I had read about). Instead of going to sleep when I felt completely exhausted at 9pm or even 8:30pm, I would return to my normal bedtime of 10pm EVERY single night. Finally, I had some progress. The 3am wakeups became more rare and again, it only became about the 5am wakeups. Soon I was sleeping until 5:30am and then sometimes very close to my alarm at 6am! But by mid-March I was going back and forth it seemed, and for the next month it was clear, I was just not returning to normal sleep. My best case scenario’s would be falling asleep at my normal bedtime of 10-1030, and then waking up around 5, and going in and out the last hour. For someone who has always needed a good 8 hours of sleep, this left me going to work exhausted as per usual, although the good news was that this second wave of insomnia was not as bad as the first. I was shot during the day, but not like I was at the end of 2016 when I let the anxiety completely consume my life. In the rare event in the last few months that I've woken at 3am, I would just turn over and try and relax. Many times I wouldn't even LOOK at my clock.
So by the end of March this has been going on for so long that I began having to put light makeup under my eyes to cover the purple bags. That's right, a 32 year old man having to put on makeup. Bc honestly, aside from those three perfect weeks in December, this was going on now for over SIX MONTHS. Now a month later at the end of April, things are still the same. I feel like I have SOME form of control over whatever my sleep disorder is, but the days of waking up completely refreshed are few and far in between.
I finally decided to return to the sleep doctor who now suddenly wants me to do a sleep study, claiming that since it has been going on this long, sleep apnea is actually a very good possibility. I told him but for my entire life, while never a great sleeper I admit, before September 2016 and that stressful event, I never experienced insomnia. He said he understands but needs to rule this out, and I may have had sleep apnea all along but the insomnia has now only maximized what one experiences during sleep apnea, and how now I'm simply more "aware" of my awakenings during the night.
I have no clue. All I do know is that I’m 6’2 very thin at 145lbs and to my knowledge a light snorer and certainly cannot fall asleep easily anywhere so the chances of sleep apnea being the culprit would truly surprise me. From what everyone has read here, do you actually think sleep apnea is a possibility??
