Tag: insomnia

SLEEPING after coming off heavily sedating psych drugs. It gets better.

My sleep has come back slowly. One of the few MDs I've worked with who has been helpful has a specialty in sleep medicine. When I met him I was lucky if I slept one hour a night and I didn't tolerate anything (supplement or psych drug wise) to help support sleep...he assured me that what he called my "sleep architecture" would come back...(he also is familiar with the sort of iatrogenic brain injury we get from the psych meds) ... in any case his words stay with me even now and I have a palpable sense of my body reconstructing my sleep architecture over time...now I can take a few supplement supports and herbs as well...but time, also, really continues to matter. I went from 0-2 hours a night (a few years of that) to 2-4 hours a night (a couple of years) and now I'm at 4-6 hours and occasionally sleep 7 or 8 hours...it's been a trip! I continue to heal. … [click on title for the rest of the post]

Broken sleep: the upside of waking up in the middle of the night

Karen Emslie at Aeon Magazine explores why broken sleep is a golden time for creativity. I’ve discovered for myself the truth of this. It’s been a lovely mysterious part of my healing journey. The loveliness of night. We’re primed to distrust and fear sleeplessness and yet once I let myself go into those wakeful times I found access to part of my consciousness that I would not have otherwise found. This is yet another way we need to forget what we’ve been told. And in so doing shed some of our fear. I've experimented further with these wakeful hours in the middle of the night and now I often spend 2 to 4 hours in the middle of the night meditating or writing. On occasion I also do gentle yoga. I do whatever my creative guide suggests I need and it's been a lovely part of my healing experience. Lately the time is used mostly for deep contemplation and meditation. It is a very special time that I very much love to have in my life. I no longer stress not sleeping but go with what it is my body leads me to do. … [click on title for the rest of the post]

Reframe your insomnia

Difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep is a very common complaint. Mindfulness can help but one must first radically revision the nature of the problem. People tend to get into a negative feedback loop with insomnia: Not getting to sleep leads to worry, leads to further difficulty sleeping, leads to more worry, leads to…. What to do? One possibility is to start thinking about the night in a different way. This is a conceptual reframing, a profoundly different paradigm regarding the issue of sleep. … [click on title for the rest of the post]

Audios for free download (good for anxiety, insomnia and can assist meditation in general)

Time for relaxation and calm

I posted these tracks for download in a long post on methods to deal with insomnia: Help for insomnia (and psych drug withdrawal triggered sleeplessness). Since they were buried at the bottom of that post I wanted to give better access to them because they're really very helpful to me and I know they've been helpful to a lot of other folks in withdrawal too. I have no doubt many people with normal stress and anxiety will find them lovely and helpful too. … [click on title to read the rest]

Help for insomnia…

Perhaps one of the hardest parts of severe withdrawal syndrome and often a part of just about any and all withdrawal from psychiatric drugs is the insomnia most people face at one time or another. It can be so severe as to be quite dangerous. Learning to soothe and ease the body back into sleep or at the very least rest becomes an issue of survival. All the below suggestions may be helpful to anyone dealing with insomnia from any source as well. … [click on title to read the rest]

Insomnia? Or is your body just asking to sleep like our ancestors did?

We have been told over and over that the eight-hour sleep is ideal. But in many cases, our bodies have been telling us something else. Since our collective memory has been erased, anxiety about nighttime wakefulness has kept us up even longer, and our eight-hour sleep mandate may have made us more prone to stress. ... [click on link for the rest of the post]

Sleeping pills…commonly prescribed medications that can cause unexpected problems

The most troubling consequence of chronic sleeping pill is an apparent reduction in lifespan in chronic sleeping pills users relative to those reporting equivalent insomnia who did not take sleeping pills.

Something to try for insomnia…

This has helped me with my post-withdrawal induced insomnia. It takes people many months and sometimes years to regain a natural sleep cycle after discontinuing psychiatric medications. This is a non-invasive and safe thing to try. This is a post I shared on some of the benzo boards. I found out that others on the... Continue Reading →

Sleeping Pills (benzos and Z-drugs) shorten life-span and a list of other adverse reactions

This is about benzos (Valium, Klonopin, Ativan, Xanax, etc) and the Z-drugs (Ambien, Lunesta) that are related to benzos. Yeah, they’re all fraught with problems.

Natural sleep or soothing remedies

ALL OF THESE SUPPLEMENTS BECOME INCREASINGLY MORE RISKY TO ADD TO A REGIME of care as one gets deeper into withdrawal. Many people on benzos have all sorts of adverse reactions to things no one else would. This stuff is great if one wants to avoid benzos to begin with!  But should only be taken... Continue Reading →

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