Wow. I wish I had posted about sleep problems before now. There seem to be a lot of us. I guess part of me wonders whether there's a bipolar person anywhere who sleeps well regularly.

I have an awful time. I work nights now and it's been really bad but I had similar trouble when working during the day. I can never seem to sleep for more than a few hours at a time now without medication. The other morning I came home exhausted and went to bed at 8am and I was awake again by 9:30.

I took seroquel for a short time, but it made me sleep so long (14-16 hours) that I could not function. Temazepam, aka Restoril works well for me but this may not be appropriate given the other meds you are taking and I can only take it for short periods since it is habit forming and I ain't headin' down that road. The only problem I have had with it was about a year ago when I was having a really bad mixed episode (and not taking it for some crazy reason) and I started thinking a lot about the bottle and counting how many were in it and so on... I got scared and when the prescription finally ran out I didn't refill it again until just recently. For a long while I just had to get rid of anything suggestive like that so it wasn't that particular med that was the problem for me.

Certainly, a regular sleep schedule is important, but (for me at least) impossible to obtain. If you can do it though, I think it will help you a great deal.