Because of my bipolar, sleep was hard for a long time. Like, whenever I was manic I could go days without sleep and weeks when I was running on maybe three hours a night… maybe. Let me tell you this for nothin’, lack of sleep doesn’t help with mania/hypomania at all. When I started collecting chronic ailments like Pokémon, that didn’t help either. Ha!
Then, sometime around 2004, I got the right medications for my bipolar. For me it was Seroquel and Topamax. Now Topamax helps because it calms my racing thoughts and Seroquel has the side effect of knocking people out until next Tuesday. And yeah, whenever I started taking it, I would immediately fall asleep right after and that was it for the night. That doesn’t happen anymore though. I can take the Seroquel and be awake hours later. Unless I eat something around the same time, then it’s lights out. Ha!
But chemical help isn’t really improving my sleep. No, what I really did was develop good sleep habits. Like going to bed at the same time every night. For me that’s 10PM — 22:00 for those of you who don’t do PM. I also avoid eating after 6PM (18:00) and avoid caffeine after 2PM (14:00). All of those help.
In the end though, I’m pretty sure it was the Magnesium that pushed me to get good sleep every night. Yeah, I suppose that’s still chemical help, but what can you do? I started taking that about two years ago and the only time I have trouble sleeping is when I forget to take my psych meds. Like if I’m wide awake at 2AM wondering about some weird thing like a paper I wrote in college a dozen years ago, then I know I didn’t take my meds.
But I still have some bad habits. Like, I watch videos for one or two hours after I lay down. So I sometimes don’t get to sleep until 1AM. And since I’ve been waking up between 5AM and 6AM that doesn’t leave me much sleep. But, for the most part, I tend to fall asleep around 11PM (23:00) so…
Anyway, those are my sleep habits. Thanks for reading. Take care, and I’ll chat at you later. Love y’all.
