Inconsistently, my early waking insomnia has been torturing me since 1997.
Early waking is when you go to sleep okay, but then you wake up at 2 or 3 am and never go back to sleep. I say inconsistently because I don't have it all the time; I will suffer for a few months, then it goes away. It's not tied to a certain time of year, stress, hormones, apnea, anxiety, physical activity, or work load. It's just there.
Everyone has suggestions, but rarely does anything work. I've been to doctors, I've taken all sorts of prescription and non-prescription stuff, I've talked to a counselor, I've tried all sorts of mind-over-matter techniques, and I've seen a whole lot of middle of the night t.v. programming. I tried to work the night shift for quite some time, and that was a huge mistake. Just because you have insomnia, it does not mean you are naturally cut out for that stuff.
One thing remains, though. I have a bad habit of internalizing things that bother me. At 2 am, those things come to the front of my mind. I am in general a secure person, but there's those little items that I don't seem to react to--and they resurface when I'm laying there trying desperately to go to sleep.
Some negative comment that someone made to me, an unfriendly look from a guy who is normally very open and friendly, the feeling that I've let someone down....I could go on and on. It leads me to believe that I'm waaay more insecure than I act.
The insomnia has started to subside lately, I've been able to get more than 4 hours of sleep each night and that's HUGE.
But then Steve mentioned to me yesterday that his older daughter, who is away at college, wants to sit down and have a one-on-one conversation with him because she "never told him something." She wants to talk to him without me present and that makes me ENORMOUSLY self conscious. I shrugged it off at first but then later started wondering if I did or said something to her that insulted her. Or hurt her. Or pissed her off. I know that not everything has to be about me, and these people all have their own lives; it's just the fact that her request to talk to her dad without his girlfriend there makes me cringe. It throws me back into that mindframe that I am waaay down there on the totem pole, below even the cat or dog.
Or maybe it's just nothing.
