"I am personally afflicted with insomnia. This is something that has challenged me since I was a child. Now, most people associate insomnia with an inability to fall sleep, however, it also includes and inability to stay asleep, or receive quality sleep in general. It is not unusual for me to wake between four and seven times a night. Typically, my number one struggle is racing thoughts, or anxiety. I just can not shut my brain down without active intervention and literal decision making. It can be very frustrating. (Have you ever gone on a tangent in your own mind for so long you completely forgot how or why you got to that topic in the first place? Welcome to my experience on a nightly basis.) Wake cycles are also stressful for me. Each time I wake in the middle of the night invariably leads to an increase in stress and anxiety about not getting enough sleep. Seems ironic doesn't it?"

I can relate to this 100%. I get awful racing thoughts and they get worse and worse every time I wake up. I have a fitbit tracker that tracks how many times I wake up during the night and It's usually upwards of 7-10, and each time I wake up thinking, "oh s*** I only have X more hours left until I have to get up. And then the racing thoughts and the anxiety comes back in full force. My brain just doesn't shut down.

Then there's the bipolar that decides to keep me up for a week or two at a time when I get stressed out or at random. I just went through finals week and didn't sleep for 6 days straight. And the week before that I didn't sleep for 5 days. My antipsychotics seem to be keeping full on mania at bay but it's not stopping the sleep loss that comes along with mania. Luckily I got some sleep last night and my sleep med regimen got changed today, so hopefully things will start looking up.