u/Sufficient_Tea_6973

I have a chilling pad on my bed. When I inevitably wake up 5 hours after sleep onset, I turn the temp to the lowest setting, 55 degrees. When I get sleepy 30-60 minutes later after the meds kick in, I get in bed, am shivering, and then turn off the chilling pad. It’s able to. give me the cold rush I need to help with sleep onset but not stay so cold that it hinders sleep maintenance. I also don’t have to get distracted by the noise of the machines.

Anyway, I’m not selling this as a cure all. I don’t want this to be a “have you tried chamomile tea?” post. Just one thing in the pantheon of tools that could help on the margins for another person.

Now that I'm on medication I had to unlearn a lot of what I had been taught through CBT-I, mainly "get up out of bed when you wake up." I used to have an efficient, consolidated short sleep. Now I stay in bed, toss and turn, and get 2 more hours of sleep total. I'll take that trade any day.

Some background:

I'm a sleep-maintenance insomniac. Hours 1-5 were never the problem. It's hours 6-8 that had eluded me. When I first started taking the medication I'd still wake up 5 hours later. "FUCK!" I thought. Then I changed strategy. I started just staying in bed, possibly even for 45 minutes. I'd always eventually fall back asleep. Without medication it used to take me 2 hours to fall back asleep, IF I ever fell back to sleep at all.

Now that I've changed strategy, the last 2-3 hours of sleep are fragmented as hell. I wake up maybe once an hour. Maybe wake up is the wrong word, it's more like stirring. When I started the meds I still had internalized all of those lessons from CBT-I. "Okay, time to start the day." Wrong instinct. Now I just stay in bed. If I'm still groggy I just put the earplugs in and the sleep mask on and just lie in bed doing my "distract your brain with useless computation" meditation exercises.

That strategy has taken me from an "efficient consolidated 5 hours" of sleep to "fragmented inefficient 7-8 hours." I will take an inefficient 7 hours of sleep over an efficient 5 hours any day of the week. I'm spending way more time in bed, but I feel better, look better, and am able to learn new things at work for the first time in years.

Of course, this is only my story. Everybody's insomnia is different, so best of luck to you with treating or coping with your own insomnia.

About two months ago I started on Dayvigo at 5mg. It was an improvement, but I still wasn't fully restored. For me I never had any problem falling asleep. I'd always wake up 5 hours later. I had better luck by taking the medicine off-label: instead of taking it at 9:00 PM when I go to bed, I started taking it immediately after I wake up 5 hours after sleep onset (2-3 AM). I'm usually up for a solid 30 minutes until I can eventually get back to sleep. I can then get 90-120 minutes of sleep. (With absolutely perfect sleep hygiene: "rumination denial of service" meditation, earplugs, sleep mask, chilling pad, etc.)

I definitely feel a bit drowsy when I wake up, so I'd urge caution for anybody who needs to drive in the morning. I have the luxury of being car-free in an urban center. I would not feel comfortable operating heavy machinery before 10:00 AM.

If there's one thing this forum has drilled into me, it's that everybody's insomnia is different, so I have no idea whether this will work for you. All I can do is share that it worked for me.

I'm curious if any of you have experience with this. Last fall (more than a year ago) I broke my knee and was in a brace for 8 weeks. Rowing has been the one area where it's been difficult to get both legs to push with equal force.

I have been able to row one leg at a time (resting my inactive leg on the seat of a second staggered Concept2). The pace is about the same 2:02-2:05 pace for 1600m, regardless of which leg I'm rowing with.

But when I row with both legs at the same time, when I drop below 1:50 pace, that's when at the end of the workout it's my uninjured leg that's quivering, meaning that I'm still compensating.

This compensation only persists with rowing. When I'm riding my bicycle it's quad on my injured side that feels the burn after 30 miles.

This imbalance has been stubborn because I'd like to go faster and get a better workout, but I don't want to mess up my leg balance I've spent more than a year getting back.

Not sure if there are sensors I can put in my shoe that will give me live feedback on the balance between my two feet.

Anybody else deal with atrophy from an injured leg/knee/foot? What did you do to get back to even?