Let me start this out by stating I have no history of insomnia and I never had chronic sleep problems before. I have had random occasions of bad nights of sleep related to specific events but they always resolved quickly.

A month ago, I had a scary health related panic attack that triggered not sleeping til 2am - I ended up taking an old ativan pill which knocked me out. The following few days, I took ativan again because I still couldn't sleep. I went to see my doctor, who put me back on beta blockers (i had been on them briefly in the summer) and also, back on zoloft (was off for a bit over a year, it helped me in the past). Things have NOT significantly improved. Some nights I fall asleep without sleep aids, but sleep in broken up amounts of hours. Some nights I take sleep aids (like unisom, or melatonin, or what the doctor prescribed...trazodone) and they sometimes work, sometimes don't. I tend to have at least 1 bad night a week where I either don't sleep at all, or get to sleep at some ungodly hour like 3am and have to get up at 6. The nights I do fall asleep, I rarely sleep before midnight. Sometimes if I'm lucky, i fall asleep before 10 for an hour and then I'm back awake several times throughout the night.

I am trying to figure out if my medications could be making this worse or continuing it. I have read that insomnia is a side effect of zoloft, as well as beta blockers (the one I am on is metoprolol, the extended release one). Neither of these meds caused insomnia for me in the past, but I suppose effects could change. I also take losartan for high blood pressure. Don't even get me started on that... I feel like my doctor shouldn't have started me on that med to begin with, but that's another story.

My anxiety is "okay" other than the sleep issue. I get through my days fine, and don't worry about many things, other than sleeping! I actually was doing okay before - I had pretty bad health anxiety, and would worry about health related stuff, but I was functioning a lot better because I was sleeping and had no problems with it. Now I have brain fog, I'm irritable, I'm tired all the freaking time, and I'm unmotivated. I am a freaking college professor, I can't carry on like this, and I am NOT myself at all.. I feel like I'm going to annoy all my friends and unintentionally push everyone away. Not to mention, the stress this is putting on my marriage. My husband has sleep difficulties as it is, and now this is happening to me. It's so hard for me to just let him sleep because I hate being alone with my thoughts and feelings.

I have been on the zoloft for almost a month (it will be a month Friday). I suppose I have noticed "some" benefits, like not thinking about a worry for as long, and not getting stuck on dumb things (like waiting for an important email). But it is NOT helping at all with the sleep, and that's all I care about right now. should the insomnia side effect be gone by now, if it were caused by it?

I hope someone has some ideas. I am trying everything I can think of.