I just don’t know what to do with myself

For more than a week I experienced one of the most intense (and lingering) insomnia attacks I’ve had in recent years. I would go to bed at my normal hours (11PM) but manage to sleep at around 3 or 4 in the morning, then would wake up at around 6 or 7. My normal sleeping pattern is this: I usually sleep for 6 hours, waking up about twice in the night to pee but managing to go back to sleep right away. But the past 12 days had been really troublesome, to put it mildly. Lacking sleep, I spent the days in a daze, grumpy, unable to do anything but laze around the house, with no appetite for food or any social interaction.

I am no stranger to insomnia; I’d been having bouts of it since I was 12 but this particular episode was strange because there was no perceptible trigger, at least in my view. I had finished working on 2 projects so I was in kind of a break from work because my new project hasn’t started yet. So no stress or deadline to think of. Aside from an old argument with my mother, there also wasn’t anything tumultuous going on with my personal life. So no stress on the front either. One more thing that bothered me was the length of this episode. These bouts usually lasted 3 or 4 days. If anything, this was the longest episode of insomnia that I’ve had in recent years.

I tried everything to deal with it: warm milk, hot bath before bed time, I stopped drinking coffee, tea, and soda, meditation, visualization… all things that have worked for me before. All of them failed me. Not wanting to take any narcotics but needing some pharmacological help, one night I drank a couple of spoons of Benadryl. I was able to initiate sleep quickly that night but on the second night, it didn’t work anymore.

A friend advised eating bananas, one fruit that I didn’t really like. I ate some but I couldn’t really say that my condition improved because of it. One night after dining out with friends, I drank a glass of vodka tonic, which made me drowsy. However, when I got home and showered, I was wide awake again. 

Last night, while I was talking with friends who visited me at home, I found myself yawning at around 10PM. When my friends left at 10.30PM, I was really feeling sleepy! So i just washed my face and brushed my teeth then went to bed and I fell asleep. To my dismay, however, I found myself again awake and alert at 1AM. But then, I was also able to go back to sleep about half an hour later and then I finally woke up at around 8.30 this morning. My longest sleep so far, yey!

I would like to analyze what happened but I wouldn’t want to spoil it so I won’t (at least, at a later time when I could gladly refer to it in the past tense). I just hope to God that this is the end of my current episode of sleeplessness.