Does anyone else swing between getting too little sleep or disrupted sleep to sleeping excessively?
I'm currently on break from work. I've been off for a little over a week now. I've got a pretty stressful job and I've also got two kids--13yrs and 10yrs. Now that I'm on break, I'm sleeping 15 hours a day fairly regularly. It's nothing new. I can sleep that much on a weekend as well.
I used to not be able to get to sleep, but that's not as much of a problem anymore. I do know that I typically wake a lot during the night. I'm taking meds that make me sleepy at night, so getting to sleep isn't much of an issue.
I went out yesterday. That takes a lot of energy. Today I didn't wake until 1:00 in the afternoon. Now it's starting to look like evening and I'm feeling out of it and very sad. I don't like it.
I spoke to my T the other day and mentioned how much I was sleeping. She said that she doesn't think I realize just how much I'm handling internally that sucks up a lot of energy. Maybe she's right?
Yeah, I do that too. For me, I get very little sleep when I'm stressed or just a little bit depressed. It's usually after I've had a full-on emotional break down that I'm finally exhausted enough to sleep for 10+ hours. So yeah, I think your T has a point about the internal battle being very tiring.
You're not alone in your struggle right now. I've been on holidays from study for over two weeks now and I'm really finding things difficult.
I hope you can overcome this soon :)
Therapy is exhausting. More than once I have left wanting to take a nap. My therapist has me build time in after therapy to do that.
I do that too.
Quite often when my life is too painful I use sleep as a means of escape. When I'm depressed I sleep too much. Till I have too many nightmares, then it doesn't work very well... and I'm back to not sleeping at all. Goes from sleeping too much to not sleeping enough, over and over again.
Part of it, for me, is for sure sleeping meds. They make me drowsy during the day too so I can end up "sleeping" (that is, waking up constantly, having EF's and nightmares, but lying down in bed) for 12 hours when I take them.
I do this too, sometimes I can't sleep and other times I sleep too much. I think it is normal and I read somewhere that people with C-PTSD tend to go to the extremes like: sleeping too much or too little, working too much or too little, too much sex or too little...