Insomnia

[dbagg 86]

Last year or so my legs get super hot and I'll almost fall asleep when it seems to hit.  Once it starts it goes on all night and I never really fall asleep, just lay there and sweat.  Any ideas?

[nnm 37896]

1 hour ago, dbagg said:

Last year or so my legs get super hot and I'll almost fall asleep when it seems to hit.  Once it starts it goes on all night and I never really fall asleep, just lay there and sweat.  Any ideas?

https://sleep.me/product/cube-sleep-system
 

Worth every penny. 

[nnm 37896]

[troph 25198]

Fuck I just went through 16 weeks of insomnia and just now found this thread. Why it’s in lulz is beyond me.

Started with Covid then entrenched asthma like symptoms for 12 weeks then 6 weeks of back to back withdrawals from prednisone (on high doses for about a month) then Xanax (on it for about two months) holy hell that was a bitch and back to back to back severe anxiety and insomnia. Sleep was buttfucked wrecked so bad. Many zero hour nights. More under 4 hour nights than I could count. I’m finally on a nice stretch of two weeks of decent sleep but PTSD all over. 
 

hydroxyzine has helped a lot, but in weaning off that now.

Valerian root is good, some consider it a natural Xanax. Who are we kidding there is no other Xanax. But it works I like it.

magnesium glycinate is good.

i take body health “sleep” that has all the amino acids and neurotransmitter precursors. It’s good.

and 150mg of hemp oil.

i don’t take all of these at the same time but they are slowly turning it around for me.

 Insomnia suuuuuucks.

[bolverk 30313]

1 hour ago, troph said:

Fuck I just went through 16 weeks of insomnia and just now found this thread. Why it’s in lulz is beyond me.

Started with Covid then entrenched asthma like symptoms for 12 weeks then 6 weeks of back to back withdrawals from prednisone (on high doses for about a month) then Xanax (on it for about two months) holy hell that was a bitch and back to back to back severe anxiety and insomnia. Sleep was buttfucked wrecked so bad. Many zero hour nights. More under 4 hour nights than I could count. I’m finally on a nice stretch of two weeks of decent sleep but PTSD all over. 
 

hydroxyzine has helped a lot, but in weaning off that now.

Valerian root is good, some consider it a natural Xanax. Who are we kidding there is no other Xanax. But it works I like it.

magnesium glycinate is good.

i take body health “sleep” that has all the amino acids and neurotransmitter precursors. It’s good.

and 150mg of hemp oil.

i don’t take all of these at the same time but they are slowly turning it around for me.

 Insomnia suuuuuucks.

It really, really does. And that PTSD-type aspect about it is what makes it so bad. Once the thought enters your head that you're going to have a hard time sleeping, it's hard to shake, and, of course, the anxiety from that fear prevents you from falling asleep.

Like I said on the previous page, sleep podcasts and the like have finally turned the corner for me. In addition to the ones mentioned, I've since discovered one called "Fall of Civilizations" by an English guy with a soothing voice. Each lasts 1+ hours, and he tells the story of various ancient civilizations from their rise to their fall. It works like a charm every time.

Now, I do also take B12, magnesium glycinate, and melatonin close to bedtime, but I have been able to ditch other meds. I also tend to run a fan for the white noise with air blowing over my face/head.

The combination of the podcasts, vitamins, and a fan has so far proven to be a successful combo over the last couple of years. Sometimes I'll throw in some THC-A if I'm feeling especially squirrely (i.e., anxious) before bedtime.

Sorry about all your troubles, Troph.

[troph 25198]

I’m on a decent roll, slept well last night. 
 

I forgot to mention ketamine infusions and a stellate ganglion block for anxiety and ptsd. Not sure if our sleep issues are truly caused by ptsd so YMMV but I had enough of a cluster of issues that both treatments were warranted and they have been instrumental. 
 

yes to white noise and podcasts, the fictitious baseball games sound awesome.

[Pods 7637]

A friend of mine got me a lectrofan white noise machine and that thing is fucking amazing. 

https://www.soundofsleep.com/lectrofan/#lectrofan-classic

Not only does it not pause and repeat the loop, but there are 20 different sound settings. 10 white noise settings and 10 different fan sounds, all at different frequencies. Paired up with a fairly large speaker. 

There are 2 industrial fan sounds that are low frequency and far more effective for me than any other white noise machine, or fan, that I have heard of. 

 

[Pods 7637]

Another thing that's worked for me is using binaural beats. It works especially well for anxiety and stress.

It plays a different frequency sound into each ear and the brain interpolates a third sound that kind of fuses the two. This can be any pitch, the binaural beats part is that they are separated by a specific frequency, usually based on the wavelength of brain waves associated with a particular activity. 

6 Hz is a sweet spot for me, it's a wavelength our brain produces when it's in relaxation and transitioning to sleep.

Like the sound machine I mentioned above, it works best for me if it's a low frequency, so I use one with 2 low frequency sounds, separated by 6 Hz. 

https://music.apple.com/us/album/6-hertz/1652720399?i=1652720401

@troph If you are comfortable talking about it more, I'd be interested in hearing more about your experience with ketamine infusions and the stellate ganglion block. My doc wasn't very receptive when I brought up ketamine infusions. 

 

Edited December 3 by Pods

[troph 25198]

I used binaural beats last night!!

 

@Pods I'll gladly share (in a bit). Both are GAME CHANGERS depending how closely your need is to what they do best, but both are very versatile treatments.

[NWBuck 8629]

I feel seen...

 

[Litig8r 418]

history of WWII always works for me.  Black and white, not a lot of changes, british accents...

[Kennythetiger 9618]

1 hour ago, Litig8r said:

history of WWII always works for me.  Black and white, not a lot of changes, british accents...

Aerial America mid Sunday mornings is outstanding napping. 

[dbagg 86]

Some nights I sleep good some not at all, the last two have been strange though.  I'll be laying there almost out cold and my dreams start to go into hyperdrive and are constantly changing different topics/scenarios very quickly, think roller coaster.  Right before I fall into the deep sleep I will get sweaty and I guess it feels like a hot flash.  Thats the moment I snap out of the semi sleep with extreme anxiety and have to adjust my sleeping position and I cool off again.  This happened all night and felt like every 5-10 minutes I'd be wide awake and never fully fall asleep.  Any thoughts/ideas?  I think I'll donate my brain to science...

[troph 25198]

On 12/2/2024 at 8:58 PM, Pods said:

Another thing that's worked for me is using binaural beats. It works especially well for anxiety and stress.

It plays a different frequency sound into each ear and the brain interpolates a third sound that kind of fuses the two. This can be any pitch, the binaural beats part is that they are separated by a specific frequency, usually based on the wavelength of brain waves associated with a particular activity. 

6 Hz is a sweet spot for me, it's a wavelength our brain produces when it's in relaxation and transitioning to sleep.

Like the sound machine I mentioned above, it works best for me if it's a low frequency, so I use one with 2 low frequency sounds, separated by 6 Hz. 

https://music.apple.com/us/album/6-hertz/1652720399?i=1652720401

@troph If you are comfortable talking about it more, I'd be interested in hearing more about your experience with ketamine infusions and the stellate ganglion block. My doc wasn't very receptive when I brought up ketamine infusions. 

 

 

On 12/3/2024 at 12:29 PM, troph said:

I used binaural beats last night!!

 

@Pods I'll gladly share (in a bit). Both are GAME CHANGERS depending how closely your need is to what they do best, but both are very versatile treatments.

So ketamine is used for treatment resistant depression, but “off label” if you will for conditions closely related like anxiety and PTSD. I am still not sure if my anxiety during 5 months of severe post covid was a primary symptom - meaning Covid caused cytokine storms / inflammation in my brain or if the anxiety was a response to the trauma and sleep deprivation. Same with insomnia and PTSD. But regardless I divided my symptoms into classes and treated them as through they were primary conditions caused by infection. For me that meant that I should not wait for my asthma like symptoms to subside expecting anxiety to subside. Instead I should treat them. I have ZERO interest in long term, dependency causing mental health meds like SSRIs. I did use benzos for sleep early on and the withdrawals for that was hellish and as hard as anything I’ve ever done. So when I started to get physically better I had few options. My two stellate ganglion blocks (see below) were likely very helpful, but the direct impact on brain neurology of ketamine was very intriguing. 

I choose a slightly higher dose than the doses offered in sessions with a therapist and instead did my therapy work 2 hours before my sessions to set intentions.  The atmosphere was a combination of mildly clinical but mostly living room setting. I sat in a recliner (in a private room) and had low lights, zen music, nature videos and black out eye mask. 
 

Each treatment was 45 mins. I did 6.  The experience was wildly enjoyable and mentally expansive. The disassociative quality of the experience was a huge positive for me as I felt initially that my body was betraying me, so to have a break from my body and just engage mentally was refreshing and quite frankly necessary. I firmly believe new neural pathways were being created to deal with my anxiety while I was tripping. Though research suggests peak neural plasticity occurs at 48 hours. The hallucinations are wild, I felt immortal, I felt grand, I felt the ancientness of the human design, I learned to trust the innate and primal instinct of my own body to heal myself. A subtle idea but it had PROFOUND impact on my journey (thankfully I do not have a chronic condition and I recognize some ableism in my statement). After multiple sessions my anxiety dropped to next to nothing, to the point that even in my last bout of insomnia over Thanksgiving week, while I had severe sleep deprivation symptoms - flashes of light, chest pain, internal vibrations, and muscle spasms - my mental health was nearly unaffected. I grew in patience and today I sit here still working through the final stages of healing I can say ketamine was a major factor in my resiliency and capacity to withstand what was a life altering, catastrophic health crisis that has broken many active healthy and strong individuals that have come before me. 

Stellate ganglion block (SGB) is a nerve block where the surgeon injects local anesthetic like lidocaine into the stellate ganglion nerve cluster (SG) in your neck. The SG is directly connected to the autonomic nervous system.  
 

the SGB procedure has been around for decades and decades and was first used to treat chronic pain. But when veterans received it they reported their war induced PTSD was also resolving.  SGB has since been investigated for anxiety, auto immune disorders and long covid. In one study over 80% of long covid patients showed dramatic improvement in symptoms with the SGB. I’m one of them. My asthma like symptoms - severe uncontrolled and untreatable - raged on my body for 12 weeks and even prednisone barely worked. It was 3 days after my first SGB that my symptoms broke. I’ll never forget at HEB Sunday night and I started hacking up a lung. It was so severe people asked me if I was ok in the store. It was the first time I saw organic systemic improvement. I’ve had two SGBs and I’ve improved every day and every week since both. I have a third and final one I’m hoping to schedule tomorrow. 
 

Im pretty confident though that the SGB helped my PTSD and anxiety as well, and I’m even more sure that  combined with ketamine they had a synergistic effect. I believe research supports this position. But I didn’t get SGB for mental health or insomnia specifically so I can’t fully address its efficacy for those purposes since I was hyper focused on resolving my long Covid symptoms. I do note that insomnia was on the list of symptoms often improved by an SGB.

My first one had no side effects other than a droopy eye, flushing, and warm extremities. My second one anesthesia “leaked” into my larynx causing a lump in my throat and difficulty swallowing for 8 hours. I also chose sedation in part because I was in such bad health I wanted the respite from my pain and enjoyed a lazy nap filled afternoon post shot. 

In short, I HIGHLY recommend both. I believe both have been critically important in my journey back to optimal health and at the center of it all has been anxiety and PTSD whether caused by Covid or a secondary effect from primary Covid symptoms I’ll not know, but those symptoms are resolving quite well. 
 

happy to answer any questions, hope this helped.

Edited December 11 by troph

[troph 25198]

i do want to add wrt insomnia - from a "medicinal" standpoint, I've had success with Valerian root (400-600 mg), skullcap (Gaia C.A.L.M supplement), and kava (I use a Gaia extract) (be very careful to get pure noble kava and no mixes etc, especially avoid kratom - one it doesn't help sleep and two it's highly addictive). I'm currently cycling off Valerian and using the Gaia Calm A.S.A.P. supplement. Kava is very strong and I'm not yet sure if it helps my sleep or not but it's very much an anxiolytic, I started it in a really dark place and cycled off of it within less than a week. I intend to try it again after the skullcap.  I'd say Valerian has been the best so far for insomnia but kava is great for anxiety at least.

Edited Wednesday at 08:16 PM by troph

[troph 25198]

I’ve found some relief with this playlist…  I usually pick one and put it on repeat and listen until I’m at the precipice of sleep. 

 

Edited Wednesday at 05:22 AM by troph