Dealing With Sleeplessness

Tarp Shelter for camping in pleasant weather.

This morning I woke at 4 a.m. and couldn't go back to sleep. As a result, I trained a bit weakly during Kettlebell swing session. I accomplished all 240 swings but needed to bull my way through the last two 30-count sets. I only executed 3 of the follow-on Turkish Get Ups instead of the 4 TGUs I performed last week.

A lot of people have trouble falling asleep. That has never been my problem with getting enough sleep. My issue is waking after five to six hours and not being able to go back to sleep. It started about four years ago when I woke every morning at 3 a.m. for weeks on end. I went to the Doctor but he had no solution other than to suggest trying an OTC sleep aid.

One night I woke a few minutes before 3 a.m. and at the top of the hour I heard a tiny persistent beeping in another upstairs room in the house. I was too tired to hunt it down and it took days to track down the source. When I found it I blamed my sleep problem (perhaps unfairly) on my ex-son-in-law. Because about four years ago my daughter bought her husband a watch as a gift. It was one of those inexpensive black plastic button-laden watches and SOMEONE set the alarm for 3 a.m. and put it in a shoe box in a neighboring bedroom. I am a light sleeper and every day for months on end I woke to that distant beep. When I found the watch I threw it in the trash because I didn't want to deal with finding out which of those annoying buttons disabled the alarm.

Without the alarm, the wake time shifted over several months from 3 a.m. to somewhere between 4 and 5 a.m. Taking the advice of my Doctor, I tried using an OTC sleep aid. The first two times I took the sleeping pill, I slept through the night but woke up groggy and that grogginess persisted for hours after waking. Then it dawned on me that I could cut the pill in half and I found I could sleep through the night and wake refreshed.

The problem with sleep aids is that people become addicted and I have no desire to be addicted to any man-made substance. In a related vein, I suffered from the usual Austin allergy problems (ragweed in fall and Oak in spring) and tried using Zirtec to help, but found myself falling asleep at work when I took Zirtec. Aha! Sleep solution! I switched to taking Zirtec at bedtime and found I could sleep through the night! Now, to prevent becoming addicted to sleep aids, I mix taking half a sleeping pill a day or two, with a day or two of taking Zirtec, with two or more days of taking nothing (and waking up at 4 a.m.).

I have often wondered if the 5-1/2 hours of sleep is sufficient to not need the sleeping aids, however, on the days I wake at 4 a.m. I find myself seriously dragging at 2 to 3 in the afternoon. I usually have a full day's worth of energy when I get 7-1/2 to 8 hours of sleep.