(not made any easier by the fact that I wake up pretty easily in those first few hours and am married to someone who goes to bed after me and could win gold in all Olympic sleeping events -sprint, endurance and creative)

Being woken by a spouse who comes to bed later ... :mad2:
Any spouse who comes to bed later is honor-bound to slip in as silently as a shadow, having brushed teeth etc. in a bathroom whose light does NOT shine directly on the bed.

But I sympathize; in years past, I would wake up no matter what. Now I sleep heavily for that first short period of time and then all bets are off. Unless I have a night like most of the nights this week, where I didn't get woken up because I never went to sleep.

Still. Not. Sleeping.

I have a six-hour drive tomorrow morning. Damn. I depend on otc sleeping meds, which don't really work for me. But my onc doesn't 'do' sleep meds.

Still, by noon tomorrow I'll be back on my property; I'll walk my woods (wearing plenty of Blaze Orange); I'll pull the spent tomato plants and wrap the trunks of my fruit trees; I'll hope to see deer in the yard at dusk. Maybe some turkeys on the back slope. I'll sip hot coffee in the morning, watch the mists swirl through the valley and toast my feet by the woodstove.

I'll think about these things and hope to slide into good dreams tonight.

Finally finished Doctor Sleep (the Stephen King book, not a self-help guide.)
Time was I would read Stephen King and I had to carry on reading because I was too scared to get out of bed and turn the light off. Actually with The Shining I was too scared to turn the page at times and had to hold the book away from me.

And yet one page of Doctor Sleep and I would wake up to find two hours had passed and I had a crook neck.
Not the fault of the book, which I do rate.
My pretendy-narcolepsy is almost as debilitating as my quasi-insomnia. I spose I had at last 35 years practice at dealing with that.

You'd do better to try not to think of anything. Thinking about the future distracts you from the present. You can only sleep in the present.

Trazadone puts me out in combination with my sleepy head playlist and gabapentin oeeps me out.
My sleep study indicated the longest period of uninterrupted sleep was about 14 minutes or so, the average was about 8 minutes for a grand total of 3 hours.

I'm on the iPhone or I'd share more

I used a fitbit for awhile to track my sleep and it showed similar sorts of things - asleep for a few minutes, then restless/interrupted for a prolonged period, with a total of 2-3 hours' sleep/night. It was so depressing I stopped using it.

OMFG my mother snores SO GODDAMN LOUDLY. We will never, ever share a hotel room again, of that you may be sure.

LOL. People say that about me too

And ... still. Not. Sleeping.

Can I call in sick at work this morning? Is insomnia a thing?

When I was a clinical clerk in Toronto, this would have been seen as an advantage.

Now, it just means that I sample the night and waste the day.

What is your going to sleep routine?

What keeps you awake, your mind or your body?

I've said this before, but it bears repeating.

I had horrible insomnia in my last semester of college. I thought it was stress. But it turned out I was anemic.

I know there can be many reasons for insomnia, but this is an easy one to rule out.

I don't watch movies or exercise within 2 hours of going to bed. I read in bed and usually I fall asleep on my book - my daughter used to laugh at me when she'd come in late to kiss me goodnight and she'd find me 'sleeping while reading', with the book on my face. I used to fall asleep immediately but wake up again fairly soon due to pain in my feet from neuropathy. Just recently I've had trouble falling asleep and that's new. It's my mind. Too much on it, I guess.

Stress hoses my ability to sleep, as you can see ...

Interesting write up in Washington Post this morning about a new study just published in Science.

During sleep, our brain cells shrink, opening gaps in between the cells, which allows extremely efficient circulation of "cerebrospinal fluid throughout the brain tissue and flushing any resulting waste into the bloodstream, which then carries it to the liver for detoxification."

The circulation clears this waste, including "beta-amyloid protein, clumps of which form plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients."