Rest and Relaxation

My moods have been stabilizing lately, much to my and my husband's relief. The solution has been a pretty simple one—regular, quality sleep at a normal time of day.

To preface this, my husband and I don't sleep well when we share a bed. It's not that we don't want to sleep together, because we do. We just don't get good quality sleep beside each other.

For a year and a half, I slept while my husband was at work because we only have one bed and a tiny apartment with no room for another. Back in 2018, we bought me an air mattress that I slept on for almost a year, but it got uncomfortable and hurt my back. So, I had to sleep in shifts with my husband again, a solution we'd needed to use before the air mattress as well.

I got used to the schedule of sleeping from 5:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. but my body rejected it because I'm a morning person, and I despised the schedule for the entire year and a half. I slept badly almost every day and sometimes my brain would refuse to sleep during the day and I'd be up for 40-60 hours simply because my brain didn't want to sleep when I prefer to be awake.

A little over a year ago, I got the idea to put a mattress pad on the air mattress, so we bought a two-inch memory foam pad. It was wonderful, and I slept happily for four months on the air mattress. But then my back started to hurt again, and I was afraid I was doomed to a life of sleeping during the day until my husband gets a better job and we can afford a two-bedroom apartment. Then we got the idea to get a second two-inch pad and stack them.

Dear God, my bed is heavenly. It is the most comfortable bed I've ever slept on in my life. Cushy soft the way I like, but the foam supports my back and keeps my spine in alignment whether I'm on my back or my side, and because the air mattress has no springs, there are no pressure points. It's like sleeping on a cloud. I love it.

Now that I have a bed that I enjoy sleeping on and can choose my bedtime, I had to develop a sleep schedule that worked for me. For a while, I just slept whenever I felt like it because I could, and I had no sleep schedule. But starting about nine months ago, I began to work seriously to develop healthy sleep habits.

While my blinding headaches have put a kink in this to an extent, the easing of the frequency of the headaches has allowed me to sleep in my bed at night again instead of sleeping during the day in the dark bedroom to reserve the night for being awake to ease my head. I've been sleeping in my bed again during the night for almost two weeks now, and I'm thrilled about it. I've woken with headaches several times and have needed to rush for the dark bedroom as soon as I could, but most mornings it's fine. Headaches seem to develop in the afternoon.

Now that I have a comfortable bed and can sleep at a time of my choosing, I've chosen a time to sleep and am attempting to stick to it. When I do, my moods become more stable and the sleep disturbances caused by mania decrease because the mania becomes less of a problem. Such a simple solution to better control my illness—better sleep habits.

Over the last fifteen years, I've learned what good sleep habits are, though I haven't fully put them into practice until lately. It can be difficult to make myself stop what I'm doing and get ready for bed, especially when I am in a zone with my writing, but I'm working on making those hard choices and putting my health first. It's especially hard now that on my non-headache days I'm working on a new draft of a long-time writing project.

I've been taught that every person needs a solid sleep schedule and a bedtime routine for healthy sleep. I started there. Then I added in an over-the-counter supplement sleep aid. I already knew I needed white noise and have used various forms of it for twenty years.

After much experimenting over the last nine months, I finally have a good sleep schedule that works, a bedtime routine that relaxes me, I've figured out a good dose of my sleep aid, and I have found some effective white noise tracks that help me sleep. With all of it, I get good sleep. Even if I change the sleep time a little (not a lot), as long as I keep the bedtime routine, sleep aid, and white noise, I can still get good sleep. If I don't do all three, I either have a lot of trouble getting to sleep or I don't sleep well, waking up a lot or waking too early. Sometimes, I'll try to shortcut my bedtime routine so I can finish something I'm working on and still get to sleep on time, but it never works out well. I need the whole routine exactly the way it is or I don't relax enough. And it's a long routine. Simple, but long.

It took me a long time to fully understand the needs I have for good sleep. For much of my adult life, I've lacked for good sleep, and now I understand why—I wasn't allowing myself the space to fully relax before going to sleep so I could get good rest. Going to sleep tense makes for tense sleep. As a naturally high-strung person, it's hard to come down off of my tense, anxiety-filled days in order to get good sleep. Thus my long bedtime routine to help me relax.

I take three hours to get ready to go to sleep even with anxiety medication, an incredibly long amount of time, but after years and years of poor sleep, I find it's worth it. An hour and a half in the bath, half an hour to set up my bed and get settled, then an hour with a specific type of music to relax me. During the bath and music, I read.

The music is a type that uses binaural beats and isochronic tones to stimulate the brain. Different frequencies of these beats and tones have different effects on the brain that then move to the body, but the specific track I listen to at night is to promote relaxation. It also uses sub-bass pulsations about the speed of a heartbeat. The music itself is very ethereal, and I find the whole thing extremely relaxing. In fact, it knocks me out, almost without fail. It's a video on YouTube, and it's an hour and a half long, but I rarely last more than an hour before getting so tired I have to roll over and go to sleep.

The sleep aid I take is melatonin, a human hormone the body produces to make itself fall asleep. I take chewable tablets that kick in within about fifteen minutes, and then I'm out. It's the only sleep aid I've ever taken that has actually worked with no negative effects. Some of the negative effects I experienced from prescription sleep aids were intense and scary, so to have something simple and safe work effectively is kind of a miracle.

While I sleep, I listen to trains. It's the white noise sound that I find the most relaxing of anything I've tried. After listening to trains every night as I sleep, if I ever ride a train, I'm just going to fall asleep the second we leave the station and miss the entire ride.

I wish any one of the three elements I need—the bedtime routine, sleep aid, and white noise—would be enough to make me sleep well, but it's not. I'm too tense, too high-strung. It's frustrating that I've become a person who is that way, but there's not much I can do about it except try to minimize the effects. One of those effects is poor sleep. At least I know what to do to work around it.

Most of the extremely positive changes have happened in the last few months since I finally settled into what appears to be a great combination to help me sleep. I can't wait to tell my psychiatrist about it. I've had next to no trouble with mania since I settled into this routine, and I hope this continues.

Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest. Here's to hoping this one is as good as I believe it is.

Photo Credit Vladislav Muslakov