Haven't slept for more than two hours in last few days

I go through bouts of insomnia they can last for weeks. I often, insomnia or not, think and work out the problems that provoke me through the day, and I follow it up the next day… this can usually go for days.

It increases right before a insomnia bout occurs. My brain goes into hyper-overdrive, like a computer burning up… but I dont see the problem I’m working on till towards the end. I drop the ball on a great number things, procrastinate… I can still think, but refuse to focus on very random and mundane tasks… an example, it can occur to me to research a particular philosopher out of the blue, but I won’t complete a essay, reply or email. It can go for days.

Physically, my body starts breaking down… simple walks just four or five miles start killing me and I become dizzy, but when I give up and lay down under a bridge to sleep… it feels that imperative, it doesnt happen. I get very irritable and stumble around… lethargic, dragging myself. I don’t know in such circumstances what propels me foreward or why. I usually do, but it seems unconscious, a beckoning. Everything becomes a confused struggle, and I’m increasingly defeated.

Then a really big idea pops into my head faster than I can put it down. Usually ideas come to me instantly, or little by little. This is a tidal flood. Ideas abd connections flood.

I also note my ability to write and recall words increasingly diminishes the longer it goes. Random music I havent heard for years starts playing in my head… I can never recall lyrics, but during these bouts I can.

Im going to have a miserable next few weeks if I dont solve this problem, and I dont even know what the problem my brain is working on is. I don’t see much cognitive impairment yet.

Im not touching my phone till sunrise, just focus on lucid dreaming. Hopefully I can trick myself into REM sleep.

Oh… Hightened warriness of threats at night, spacially, in real time. I am here, sound over there…


I have a body clock that is forty eight hours instead of twenty four

i suffered insomnia once*… then i smoked weed. It helped a LOT. Insomnia was gone. I once felt the onset of a slow death of my eyes, due to an ill-advised experiment… then i smoked weed. Back to normal.
You could try a very small, medicinal dose…

  • I had my bout of PTSD once, manifesting mostly as a severe insomnia that kept me awake so much that, at times, i’d sleep 2 hours in 2 days, just like your case i think. But now i’m back to normal,…

I suffered from insomnia between 1992 - 2003 and, at the time, it was a hell-like experience.

I have very great difficulty sticking to a regular sleep pattern, and really have to force myself to go to bed at the same time each day, whether I feel tired or not, and set my alarm in the morning, and always get up.

Turd, research natural herbs and supplementals for insomnia , I think I remember certain lights can help insomnia and can cause it.

I’m not drugging myself, not with weed or special herbs at least.

I think I got a half hour. Gonna watch the sun come up.

In Maia’s case, the blind frequently have it hard to sleep on a regular schedule. The are photosyntic sensors on the back of your knees… I know that sounds absurd, but trust me.

A kind of lamp known as natural light lamps put out the same lightband as sunlight, normal indoor lights do not. Shine it at the back of your knees for 15-20 minutes a day when your supposed to be up but are falling asleep, keep them covered when dark. Do not use as a ceiling light, I know you don’t care if the light is on or not, but guests will leave it on.

It won’t work for me, as I lived through these bouts up in Alaska, the sunlight changes 6 minutes per day, from almost nothing to almost constant… outside of insomnia bouts, I had no effect from the sun, and light discipline did shit for me. I know some blind people do have success with it.

The back of the knees, seriously? Will real sunlight do, if I sunbathe face down for example?

I’ve found that since I’ve been working most evenings, which involves a lot of physical exercise, I can sleep better.

http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/08_02/bright_knees.shtml

They re-did that experiment, under more controlled conditions. Turned out it was an artifact. Sorry.

That’s a pity. It’s still worth a try though, as it’s not particularly difficult.

that would be your loss…
Quotes from the US Government page on cannabis*:

“The endocannabinoid system is believed to be centrally involved in the regulation of mood and the extinction of aversive memories. Animal studies have shown CBD to have anxiolytic properties.”

“increased quality of sleep and relaxation in THC-treated patients.”

While you’re awake, adenosine levels rise peaking toward late evening and is linked toward triggering sleep, along with the body’s melatonin, released when darkness falls. Adenosine is part of the family of the bodies energy delivery systems though atp and adp (triphosphate diphosphate) so might just be an unrelated side effect of daily metabolism.

One area of the brain

Has been found that seems vital, but they haven’t yet developed sedatives specifically targeting it.

http://www.futurity.org/side-sleeping-brains-979872/

Sleeping on your side is best for cleaning all the goop out of your brain.

Getting to sleep wise, don’t have many tips, except boring ones. Try to do something physical everyday, and something mental, something that makes you feel you ‘achieved’ something, rather than just exist, I know, a bit vague. Keep to the same general hours, switch from screen to paper reading wise late evening, or at least no media that requires active interaction. We don’t have strong in-built natural sleep triggers because tigers might have leapt out of trees just after bedtime.

Ferg, being smart is probably your sleep problem, and probably all the traditional methods, being a bit placebo/belief based won’t cut through your critical thinking/skepticism. Unless you just straight-up tranq yourself.

I’d suggest you exhaust yourself physically at a set time each day somewhere around twilight. Then stay away from the pc. Watch Lexx or something, that put me to sleep.

Most of these, or at least the important ones, are triggered by light, or its cessation. And while there may, or may not, be areas of the body that are light sensitive enough to make a miniscule difference (whether or not the back of the knee is one of them), in fact, pretty much all such stimuli are channelled through the visual cortex, for those people who happen to have a functioning one. Do not confuse light with heat, of course.

Dumb question Maya, have you ever tried one of those plastic-brain devices…? It would be something like a lightdetector, clipped onto a wrist band or something, that tapped you in the presence of light.

There’s cases of people with sight impairment becomming able to see again with having a shoulder mount camera sending information to a haptic pad on their back, which represented moving images as patterns of touch.

The brain seems after a while to send different types of information, recieved via any sense, to the appropriate areas of the brain to process. However, I think it requires that you previously had a trained visual area of the brain to work with, if you’ve been blind since birth, I don’t think it would work, or at least not as quickly or easily.

Ferg.

Stupid ‘how to sleep’ ideas.

Anti-tiger in tree countermeasures.

Your brain is dumb. Back in the day, people who possessed the innate ability to fall into a deep, near impossible to wake from, sleep as soon as the sun went down got eaten by tigers who had evolved a tendency to secretly hang out in trees near people at sunset. Those natural sleepers died out, because it’s hard to reproduce if your penis/vagina is slowly melting in tiger-acid. So humanity is a light sleeper, with an aversion to trees sturdy enough to bear the weight of tigers in the bedroom.

While there may no longer be tree-tigers in our local vicinity, metaphysically, they still exist. Dumb example, post war on the net. You’re in a post war with some damn guy who lives in another time zone. You post, he posts. It’s getting late. But goddamit, if you sleep, he’ll have time to eat your last post alive, and by the time you wake up the entire intellectual world will be burning effigies of you in the street and generally teabagging your online reputation.

Decide what you are emotionally attached to, something that maybe has a time-limit involved, something that requires your constant input to protect or further. Chances are, your brain, sensing a tiger hanging over that thing, isn’t daring to let itself sleep. If you find it, decide how important it is really, and tell your brain to get a fucking life if it isn’t something critical.

Gotta go, back later.

anti-dark-knight syndrome countermeasures.

Maybe you suffer from a feeling of overwhelming responsibility. A feeling that if you let your guard down, even for a second, the forces of evil will leap from the shadows and perform rigorous surprise buttsex with all that you love.

Decide if there is anything or anyone, or some part of your life towards which you feel strongly about, that you believe is under some kind of threat, real or existential. Decide what, if anything you can pragmatically do about it. Do it. If nothing can be done about it, tell yourself that, repeatedly. Or try a prayer to the celestial spaghetti monster just on the offchance and be done with it. I’ve done it myself, no shame in a little pascal’s wager.

If you have someone nearby, that you trust, get them, when you go to bed at your set time, but before they do, to say outloud:

“You’ve done enough, I’ll take first watch, you sleep.”

If you don’t have anyone nearby, get a friend, that you trust, to phone you at a set time and say:

“You’ve done enough, I’ll take first watch, you sleep.”

Worst case scenario, draw a face on your bell-end, cut a post-it note into the shape of a speech-bubble, and write on it before you stick it on your dick:

“You’ve done enough, I’ll take first watch, you sleep.”

Anti-milestogobeforeIsleep countermeasures.

We’ve all got stuff we instinctively think we should be getting on with in life. Even though we might procrastinate, try to forget about it or bury it under a bunch of junk in the basement. Reproduction, the acclaim of our peers, safety whatever, the big fat basic prehistoric drives.

Sit and count as many of these basic drives as you can think of. If, as you count through them, you tear up, feel a wrench, get angry - whatever emotion, then that’s the one.

Accept it. Even if rationally you reject it, consider it prosaic, not your style whatever. You can’t fight yourself.

Break it down into a bunch of goals that are achievable on preferably a daily basis. Doesn’t matter how small the goals are, only that they are finite, and have a foreseeable end-point. Do them.

Ok that’s all I got.

I’ve never tried anything like that, and it all sounds a bit cumbersome. Much easier just to buy a talking light detector, if I ever needed one.

Probably, it was years ago now that I read about it.

Google says they’ve made it into a lollipop.

http://www.ibtimes.com/fda-approves-plastic-lollipop-helps-blind-interpret-images-using-their-tongue-1979675

+++When made available for commercial use, the device is expected to cost around $10,000.+++

+++According to Gizmodo, the vibration can help the blind person identify the shape, size and location of different objects.+++

I can do that anyway, for free, by echo location, simply by clicking my tongue.

Did you evolve in some underground civilization, then, Maia… as your name anyway suggests? I almost always have wanted to meet that type :stuck_out_tongue: