[triplewater11]

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.

[Skeezyks]

Hello triplewater11: I'm sorry... but I don't really have any suggestions here. However I saw no one had replied to your post. So I thought I would.

I also have quite a bit of difficulty sleeping. However, I'm no longer working. So I can be tired & it's no big deal for me. The one thing I know, from personal experience, is that when one begins making changes in med levels, or changing med's altogether, it can become really difficult to know what's causing what. Medications, in general, seem to make me groggy. (I no longer take any.)

My pdoc suggested I try Melatonin at one point. I did. But I found that, if I was going to be able to go to sleep, I didn't need it. And if I wasn't, the Melatonin didn't help. Plus, either way, it made me feel groggy the whole next day.

[yugh]

Hi,
An idea you might want to research is using the Monroe Institute's Hemisync products. So what is this?

in the 1950's-80's there was a man named Robert Monroe. He was a millionaire, lived in New York but he had a problem..he kept leaving his body. So he went to a number of doctors who all assured him he was sane. So he decided to go with his experiences.

He then bought some property in Virginia and started the Monroe Institute to research out of body experiences. He then experimented with different wavelengths in assisting other people to have out of body experiences what he so easily had.

He would put one frequency in one ear and a different frequency in the other ear. What he discovered was that the brain interprets the delta difference between the two frequencies. He discovered it could assist others in getting to the theta state quite quickly.

He patented the technology as Hemi-sync. It has been widely used over the years for postop recovery, insomnia, meditation, etc. If you go to hemi-sync dot com and look under the "Real life applications" you will find "sleep and dreams ". There's a large number of products to choose from. You might want to contact the Monroe Institute to get their advice on which one will work best for you.

I hope this helps you.

With kind regards,
Guy

Originally Posted by triplewater11

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.

[LucyG]

I've been where you are, and it lasted for years on end to where I wouldn't get to sleep until 5 or 6 a.m., and then get about an hour and a half of very light dreamy sleep. I tried everything to no avail until I started taking extremely high doses of magnesium as my naturopath concluded my body doesn't hold on to it.

I was on a lot of meds, and one thing they do is block magnesium and/or waste it to where you end up with a serious deficiency. Pysch meds along with a lot of other meds are notorious for this so this could be part of your problem. There's a great book called The Magnesium Miracle by Dr. Carolyn Dean. I would urge you to get it and read how the meds you're on affect your magnesium levels as she does a very good job of explaining it.

You want to be sure to take a magnesium that is easily absorbed such as magnesium chloride or citrate. Whatever you do, don't take magnesium oxide as all that does is give you raging diarrhea. And you need to take calcium, vitamin D3 and K with it as the 4 work together.

I truly believe that these pysch meds destroyed my body's ability to sleep by so depleting my magnesium stores. I hate to harp on it, but I was on those meds for 13 years, and by the time I got off them, my life revolved around wondering if I was ever going to sleep again. Sleeping meds didn't work for me. It was torture not sleeping. Now that I'm off them and giving my body the things it needs, I sleep remarkably well most nights.