This week is ME awareness week. ME (also known as CFS) is generally categorised as fatigue lasting more than three months and not explained by another diagnosis. But it’s so much more than feeling tired, so this week I will be concentrating on a different symptom each day and how they affect me. For more information on ME see the ME Association website.
Today I'm focusing on sleep problems.
I have always had a tendency to suffer from insomnia. Even as a child I rarely slept through the night. And as an adult I'd go months with only a few hours sleep each night. But since having ME this has got much worse.
The biggest problem is unrefreshing sleep. Often on paper it looks like my sleep is fine. I get the right amount of sleep but still wake up feeling like I've not slept. As well as this I can cycle between insomnia where I get little sleep or hypersomnia where I cant wake up. I sometimes joke that I've turned into a cat because some days I can sleep for 20 hours and still need more sleep.
There isn't any specific sleep advice for people with ME. I already had good "sleep hygiene" because of the years of trying to cope with insomnia. But I needed to find even more ways I could improve my sleep. and I have by making lots of changes. Some of the things I've done to improve my sleep:
- Fitting black out blinds and curtains to make the room darker
- Using smart lights that change the type of white light so I get more blue light during the day and yellow light in the evenings (replicating natural light like this helps maintain circadian rhythms)
- Using blue light glasses and screen settings to reduce the blue light from screens
- Not using my phone at night
- getting a new mattress and pillows so I can support my body better in bed
- taking pain killers and CBD before bed
- playing sleep music
- journaling
- getting a weighted blanket
Basically just making sure the environment is the best I can get it to help me sleep. Even with all that I still often struggle to get enough sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment