Tag: sleep

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]

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]

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