To sleep.

I had an hour & half long visit with Dr. Sleep yesterday. She’s a great lady & I feel hopeful she can help me solve this problem.  If it comes to the worst case scenario, she studied at Duke, where apparently they have a world renowned sleep program & she can get me into it.

I’d have to go to NC for who knows how long but we’ll cross that bridge if we come to it.

There’s a good sleep program ‘locally’ though so that’d be a last resort.

Why ‘locally’?

Well…as with everything other medical thing in my life, the good docs (or in many cases, like this one, the ONLY special docs) are over an hour away. (My regular doc is 25 minutes away to the south & is part of a group based around a specific hospital 35 minutes away from them, with specialist scattered around that city. If I went to a doc 20 minutes to the north, they would send me to specialists 35-45 minutes further north. We drove over 90 minutes in an ice storm when I went into labor with Mayhem)  Blocking out 3+ hours of my day 2x a week to attend cognitive behavioral therapy is bound to be challenging.

So the sleep program is Phase 2 now, at least 8 weeks away, probably longer since that would be July & there is no way I can manage it until the kids are back in school.

For now I have Phase 1, which is a full page of instructions (many of which I have tried in the past) and a sleep log.

9 years of insomnia has caused me to develop certain mental habits (like a refusal to get out of bed when I can’t sleep because then the insomnia wins) & many of the instructions are to help me recognize where I am self-sabotaging.

The getting out of bed thing is going to be hard. So’s the no chocolate & the exercising vigorously before bed (sounds counter to advice but recent studies on my particular form of long term insomnia indicate it can be beneficial).

No screen time an hour before bed (jury is out on the Kindle but the lack of backlight makes it ok for now).

But Nathan Fillion is on at 10pm Sun & Mon!!!!!

DH says that is what tivo is for.

It looks like I will have time to finish the Longest Cross Stitch Project Ever because she wants me to try non-mentally stimulating things during that hour, like cross stitch, crochet or word search puzzles (not crosswords, too stimulating, so’s sudoku).

I’ve got to cut out caffeine but my coffee is already 3/4 decaf now so that switch is not too bad & I’ve done it before. I drink Coke & Sprite more or less interchangeably so that’s not too bad either.

No alcohol. That’s challenging. I like my wine with dinner or my cider in the evening (often with some chocolate)

No more going back to bed after the boys leave for school & I’m supposed to get up at the same time every day.

Now I ask you, what is there to do at 6:45am on a Saturday? I don’t garden. Sure I can read blogs but then what do I do in the afternoon? One of the reasons I go back to bed 2x a week is because there is NO GOOD REASON TO BE AWAKE at 7:30am. Nothing is open at that hour to run errands. I can’t make or return phone calls. Once you start a load of laundry there is nothing to do until 45 minutes later when you rotate it & wait another 45. Why not go back to bed?

So I have the feeling that rule may get fudged on the weekends. I can suck it up and find something to do on Tues & Thurs probably but the weekends will be a problem.

These various things are not permanent, after 8 weeks we’ll see where we are & then I can experiment with adding stuff back & seeing what happens.

And I have to keep a chart of my sleeping habits.

I’ve tried most of this, except the getting out of bed thing, in the past. But not all at once, so I am curious how these next weeks will play out.