Sunday, August 5, 2012

Insomnia

I don't know if there is anything more depressing than being awake in the early hours of every morning and watching futilely as the minutes slowly tick away while the rest of the world sleeps. Silence surrounds you and all the unwanted thoughts of the day rise to the surface in your mind. You lay in bed, once a place of refuge from the world, now your own private hell. This has been my reality now for the past five days as I struggle to stay asleep. Getting to sleep seems to be no problem, what I am now unable to do is stay asleep for longer than three hours or so in a row. I am waking up every morning, without fail at any time between 12am and 2am, and then literally being awake for HOURS on end (and not just 1-2 hours but more like 4-5 hours) before finally drifting back to sleep for another hour or two if I'm lucky before the whole day begins again. Then I spend the day feeling absolutely exhausted and emotionally distant from the world, everything seems too difficult when you don't get enough sleep, even the most simple of tasks seem to require too much energy to complete. I'm guessing that this insomnia is related to my pregnancy and that the difficulty staying asleep is due to anxiety about the upcoming birth and due to hormonal changes as well, etc etc but that doesn't help me feel any better. All I feel is absolutely frustrated and depressed at the idea of having to get through yet another day on only a few hours sleep, I feel somehow ripped off that I am unable to enjoy the time I have left before our new baby is born because I am so tired. I get to a point where I would give anything just to get some sleep, I think I would take any other pregnancy complaint over this. I don't know how I am going to get through the next 5-6 weeks if this sleeplessness continues.

2 comments:

Kath said...

Let's see if this works - last time I posted I couldn't log on - so this is a test

Kath said...

Ok so it worked (thanks James). My heart goes out to you Fi. Being awake in the night feels so lonely and then being exhausted during the day is awful, especially when you have a small child making constant demands on you. It does sound like late pregnancy is the cause - not that that is any comfort when you are going through it.