How does insomnia affect SA?

[DanielLewis]

For the past few years, I've been battling insomnia and chronic sleep deprivation. It's due to behaviors that threw off my circadian rhythm and depression or life worries. I'm just wondering how this could affect SA because, one thing I've noticed, is I've been feeling an overwhelming fear when I'm the presence of people sometimes. I don't quite know how to explain why it's happening. It's like, when someone says something to me, my mind and body goes "Oh sh#@!" and I try to hide what I'm feeling but it shows through. I can tell by how people react it's showing through my body language. I never used to feel this way. I know there's no reason to feel this way. I'm not sure if it's because of the lack of sleep, subconscious thoughts (consciously, I can't detect anything I may be thinking of to cause such fear).

 

[Sacrament]

Probably quite a bit, since proper sleep allows you to be more relaxed and your brain is working better than it would on little to no sleep.

 

[Strong]

Hurts me because lack of sleep makes me look worse

 

[pacman490]

I stutter more when I'm sleepy so that might be it. Then the anxiety situation just adds to the anxiety and so on....

 

[zharl]

It probably doesn't help. Lack of sleep exacerbates everything doesn't it? I think that I suffer from insomnia, as I'm often up for the entire night--sometimes I'm up BECAUSE of anxiety, so they may affect each other. However, I also suffer from ADHD, so that could be related to my odd sleeping patterns...but I digress.

I find that when I haven't slept, I have more general anxiety, but it doesn't seem to effect how I feel socially. If anything I'm less aware of social stuff when I'm sleepy, so I might not be as socially anxious, simply because the feeling takes too much energy.

Eh...final verdict? Sleep is good. Lack of it probably doesn't help anything. But what do I know?

 

[Argentum]

I get bouts of insomnia and while I don't think it's the cause, it definitely makes it worse. When you haven't been sleeping, and especially when you're stressed about not sleeping even though you're dead-tired, you can become either unresponsive and slow or twitchy and high-strung.

Sorry to hear you're going through it. I usually give up after 2-3 bouts of 20-30 minutes of dozing and just watch movies.

 

[DanielLewis]

I get bouts of insomnia and while I don't think it's the cause, it definitely makes it worse. When you haven't been sleeping, and especially when you're stressed about not sleeping even though you're dead-tired, you can become either unresponsive and slow or twitchy and high-strung.

Sorry to hear you're going through it. I usually give up after 2-3 bouts of 20-30 minutes of dozing and just watch movies.

Yeah, it's causing me to worry a lot more about what's happening to my body. I've been worried, for example, if I'm going to lose my hair sooner or if I might have some heart attack or something because it's been so severe. It's really bad because I've had a hard time sleeping everyday now so I'm getting like 2 hours a night on average.

I think I should do what you're doing and give up and get out of bed sooner if I don't fall asleep easily. I tend to stay in bed, trying to fall asleep, but the worst thing is when I fall into this half-asleep, half-awake state. It's where I'm not really getting good sleep, if any at all, and I'm like partially awake. I'll then jump in and out of being fully awake. It's weird and I'm not sure what to call it, but I know others have experienced the same thing.

All I know is that when I get this problem handled, I'm never going to do anything to throw off my circadian rhythm again. I think we're such creatures of habit and since I had bad sleeping habits for a long time, undoing them has become very difficult. My body doesn't seem to want to cooperate.