How A Bad Nights Sleep Can Negatively Impact Your Entire Week if You Let it

My sleep has never been better, but I had a bad nights sleep on Sunday night and it had a huge impact on my week. Here's what happened and how I'm going to course correct.

This one will be a bit of a brain dump as I try to figure out what’s going on in my head as I write. So please, bare with me.

Irrational Fear of Being Tired.

My sleep has been better than ever for probably the last two years. It got better again last April when I got sober, then better again in October last year when I started tracking my sleep, causing me to be more mindful of it.

Sleep is something I have always struggled with. It makes sense, especially as a kid with undiagnosed ADHD. I have always struggled to switch off, to get to sleep. Once I’m asleep, I am fine. It’s like I want days to be 28 hours long instead of 24 to allow me to get tired enough to fall asleep and still get a good night's sleep.

It was a lot worse when I was younger. My mum is a midwife and would work shiftwork. My dad would start work at 7 am each day so that he would go to bed early. When mum was on an evening shift, often she wouldn’t be home until after midnight. As a kid, I remember nights when mum was at work, and I would be anxiously mindful that tonight was a night I needed to get to sleep before dad went to bed. Otherwise, I would most likely be up until mum got home from work. Once I was the only one still awake in the house, panic would set in.

I would ring my mum’s work landline; I still remember the number off by heart. I’d be crying down the phone, asking mum when she would be home, if she could come home earlier or if there was something in the house I could take to help me get to sleep.

I would have been single-digit years of age, already looking for some external substance to silence my thoughts. In hindsight, it’s no wonder I ended up having issues with substance abuse. From a young age, I believed that tablets were the solution to emotional problems rather than psychological work.

The panic and anxiety were all driven by an irrational fear of being too tired to function properly the next day. This is some shit a nine-year-old fucking kid should not be stressing about, but that was me. My mum used to say that I’d be the only nine-year-old to die of a stomach ulcer. Stress can cause stomach ulcers which can kill you. Hilarious joke, but maybe more so a sign that I might’ve needed some help? Anyway.

I’ve carried this fear around with me all my life. I just got better at not sleeping much, with experience, you know? As I got older, I would use whatever I could when these episodes arose. Paracetamol, ibuprofen, paracetamol with codeine, Phenergan, whatever I could dig out of the medicine cupboard.

It’s weird. I get so fucking tired, but when I lay down, I know I won’t be sleeping anytime soon. I try all the generic shit first. Shit, me, people who have never had issues falling asleep, telling you what you should do to fall asleep. “Oh, you just need to not worry about it; take some deep breaths, count to 100, see if you can count sheep, just focus on your breath.” Do you think I haven’t fucking tried all these things a million times?

Medications have always been a last resort for me. I never wanted to rely on something I couldn’t have unlimited access to. When I was a kid, my mum had a friend whose son was a drug addict. I don’t know what he was addicted to. But She just told me he was a drug addict. She told me it was terrible, that he was sick, and that drugs could kill people. So maybe that’s why I have always had a fear of addiction.

The nights I would resort to medications were when I would have already been trying to sleep for hours. So if I could access anything to help me sleep, I wouldn’t take it until the early morning hours to get some sleep. But of course, by that stage, you are so fucking tired, and with a sleeping aid thrown in, once asleep, you are going to struggle to get up. So the solution to the problem that was my inability to sleep was only bringing me closer to the main initial fear, having to go to school or work feeling exhausted.

As I got older, I would rely on alcohol at times to help me sleep. Never every night, but certainly a few times a week. I used to drink all day on Sundays slowly. Telling myself that I can drink while I potter around getting ready for the week. Meal prep, drink, fold washing, drink, pack lunch for work, drink, etc. Spend the day getting steadily drunk, go to bed early, and wake up fresh on Monday, and some magical beer-drinking fairy had done all the chores for you the day before, and it worked, most of the time, kind of.

Six years ago, I was finally diagnosed with and medicated for ADHD. This changed everything. I struggled with sleep a little bit as I adjusted to my medication and built my tolerance. It didn’t take long because when I was younger, I was pretty fuckin’ good at taking amphetamines. My body had seen this shit before, and this was a microdose. Oddly, stimulant medication helped with my sleep hygiene, but it helped me get all my energy out during the day, so I was worn out by the evening.

Still, though, I wasn’t entirely immune to these odd nights where no matter what I did, I just couldn’t fuckin’ sleep! But they were getting less frequent, and I figured that maybe, hopefully, I was growing out of it and eventually, it would taper off entirely and never happen again.

Eighteen months ago, with my psychiatrist's help, I adjusted my medication and added a second medication for me to take in the evening. It isn’t a sleeping tablet by any means. Just a medication for me to have around dinner time that would help my mind to start winding down, the same way an average person’s brain would around the time the sun went down. He hypothesised that my brain’s function to do that was broken. It helped a lot.

The key for me has been getting up at the same time each day. It was hard at first, but my body would automatically calibrate itself around the time I woke up, so after a couple of weeks of forcing myself to get up early, I found I was falling asleep too. I had found my perfect sleeping rhythm, and I was fucking stoked because until now, sleep fucking hated me.

Naively, I thought I was passed all of this. I had finally found the recipe for success. It was showing in other aspects of life too. I was becoming a grown-up. I bought a house, got a couple of promotions, became a dad, and bought a second house, all this great stuff.

Then last Sunday, it came back. In a hurry. This fucking tidal wave of insomnia and irrational thought. I felt like that nine-year-old boy, too scared to wake his dad for help, crying down the phone at his mum while trying to get her work done. Powerless to help me, tired and frustrated, I could tell I was a massive inconvenience to my mum when I did that. I didn’t want to call her. I wanted to fucking sleep. I wouldn’t have been calling if I hadn’t already exhausted all other options.

I thought it would just be Sunday night. I thought I would go about my day on Monday, have a rest day from exercise and go again on Monday. Come Monday night, I felt okay about getting to sleep until I got to bed. When I get like this, it’s like there’s something in my pillow that activates my brain. I’d been lethargic all day long. I was actually looking forward to getting to bed, but as soon as I lay down, those thoughts came rushing back.

It’s distinctly different to your standard stress-before-sleep thoughts. It’s like as soon as you lay down, you take a big breath in and then out. You know you’re not sleeping anytime soon. Like you are sure. You get up to go to the toilet, and you’re so tired that you’re eyes sting. You fumble your way back to bed, lay down and boom, your mind is wide awake again.

My habit tracking spreadsheet's sleep section- Green is good, yellow is okay, and red is bad.

Eventually, I went to sleep on Monday night, but the same thing happened again on Tuesday. I went to bed worried about ti happening. I was thinking about it constantly. And I think there lies the problem, and I don’t know what to do about it other than what I have already been doing. Luckily, I have a long weekend that I can use as a bit of a reset! It’s probably my fault for annoying everyone on Twitter with these silly polls!

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The Knock-On Effects of One Bad Sleep