Skip to main content

I'm So Tired, But I Can't Sleep

 


You would think that if you're really, really tired, you should have no problem falling asleep, right? Yeah, right. Unfortunately, as soon as I lie down, all the pain that I've been ignoring throughout the day demands attention. 

Stabbing pains in my feet. The feeling of needles dipped in jalapeno juice inserted under the nails of my toes and fingers. Twitching muscles in my calves and forearms. Everything hurts. 

So many times I think, "If I could just sleep," but most of the time sleeping is not easy. It can take several hours to fall asleep no matter how exhausted I am. Once asleep, I rarely stay asleep for long. If I only wake up 3-4 times during the night, I've slept pretty well most nights.

Nothing I've tried seems to work if I take it multiple nights in a row, so I mix things up. Things that seem to help me either fall asleep or stay asleep include melantonin, magnesium, tulsi tea, valerian tea, and soaking my feet in an epsom salt bath (no bathtub or I'd try soaking my whole body). The melantonin is accompanied by wild dreams. The magnesium can cause diarrhea. The tulsi tea helps me stay asleep, but is no help whatsoever in getting to sleep while the valerian tea helps me get to sleep and sleep deeply for 3-4 hours before I'm wide awake. And the epsom salt soak for my feet relaxes me and relieves the pain in my feet and lower legs so I can get to sleep, but I don't stay asleep. Still a little sleep is better than nothing. 

At some point, I'd like to do a self-study and track using the same thing every night for a week and seeing which is better and if any of them have any cumulative affect, but I'm too tired to track anything right now. I think I need some sleep.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Spoonie Wrist Cozies

  A 7-page PDF for these is available for free on Ravelry . The PDF has all notes on size and spoonie tips and charity knitting ideas. I wear some kind of fingerless mitts almost year-round. In summer, I wanted something a little lighter to protect my hands where the hand and wrist connect. When air conditioning or even just a fan hits here, it can be quite painful. These were my answer to the problem. This is a quick knit and would be a great gift or charity project. The cozies pictured above are the Loose Fit on size 7 needles and they have about an inch of give as I don't like anything that fits closely near my wrists. I can no longer wear bracelets.  These came out too loose on my testers so I made a close fit pattern, too, and also tested them with size 6 needles for a smaller fit. The great thing is that these are such a quick knit, you can make several sizes and donate or give away the ones you don't like. They would also make a great spoonie gift.  Yarn: worsted w...

Knitting and Fibro

  My grandmother taught me to crochet when I was maybe 7 or 8. I didn't know anyone who knit growing up. Then, I moved to China and nearly froze to death my first winter and decided I needed to learn to knit socks. Youtube knitting videos weren't what they are now back in 2001 and I had a single booklet on how to knit socks and that was it, but I managed to teach myself to knit through the back loop. Chinese knitters would snatch my knitting out of my hands and tell me I was doing it wrong and "show" me the right way by knitting several rows as fast as they could. I started telling them that I knit the American way so they would leave me alone and then I'd rip out their knitting and do it my way.  Later, a kindly Canadian took very sweetly observing me knitting my first sock inside out delicately declared that there was nothing wrong with what I was doing, but if I wanted to knit my sock with the cable on the outside, I might want to consider knitting through the ...

What's a Spoonie?

  Christine Miserandino of butyoudontlooksick.com came up with Spoon Theory when trying to explain what living with lupus every day was like. Spoons represent energy.  A spoonie is someone with a chronic illness that battles fatigue. Often these illnesses are invisible which means the person may not look ill on the outside, but may be battling invisible symptoms of fatigue, pain, inability to sleep, brain fog, and others.  Non-spoonie people may not get enough sleep the night before because they worked late and may feel tired when they get up the next morning. Usually though, they aren't having to choose between getting a shower and eating breakfast because they don't have enough energy for both.  Spoonies don't wake up with the same number of spoons each day either. Someone who wakes up with a flare is going to have much less energy than they have on a relatively good day.  Imagine starting your day with 10 spoons of energy. You woke up several times during the...