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It is seriously the weirdest phenomenon.
Once again, I am going through a phase where I wake up at 4:00 in the morning. It doesn't matter if I go to bed at 10:00, or at 11:00, or after midnight. My eyes are going to pop open at 4:00 in the morning. I can fall asleep, and what can possibly be making me wake up in what is for all intents and purposes the middle of the night is entirely beyond me.
And yes, I am tired all day.
It's not that I don't have plenty of reasons to be going through a stretch of time where I'm stressed out. There are several things going on right now that are potentially pretty significant, and that always makes me twitch. I'm still working to recover entirely from the dismantling of the apartment on the day before Christmas -- you have no idea how much havoc you wreak when you have to pull apart everything and throw it into boxes in two hours. It just is taking me for-freaking-ever to finish putting everything back where it goes.
But I cannot understand why I'm doing it again. Waking up at 4:00. What is that? It doesn't seem to be caffeine. It doesn't seem to be anything. And it's happened before, and it always resolves itself after a while. In the meantime, I'm sitting there suffering through, like, the end of Nick at Nite and the 50 channels of infomercials that are on at 4:00 AM Central. I can try to go back to sleep, but it won't work.
In a sense, it has an upside. I get up and work sometimes. Even if I don't start working then, by the time it gets to be 6:30 in the morning, I've already been up for two and a half hours, and then I really am ready to work. I write recaps at 6:00 in the morning. It makes for a long day with a lot of productive hours.
Except that I am so tired. This descends on me in this really obnoxious, cyclical way where I know it's just going to hang around for a few weeks, and then it will be gone, and it's just about due to be gone. But it doesn't make me fall asleep earlier at night, and it doesn't make me nap during the day, except very occasionally. Mostly, it just makes me plod along on, say, five hours of sleep a night for several weeks on end. And it doesn't change on weekends, and it doesn't depend on whether I'm going to the office. And it's freakishly consistent. One day, I wake up at 3:56, one day at 4:04, one day at 4:01, one especially bad day at 3:45 and one really good day not until 4:45. But mostly, it's right around 4:00.
My favorite thing to do with my free time is to write emails, but I worry about what people will think if they get one that's labeled as sent at 4:45 AM.
What's stupid is that I think part of it is that I'm excited. When I get a lot of things going in the right direction at once, I really roll. Not in an unbalanced way -- I don't have any trouble putting everything down at the end of the day. But I think part of this is about, "Woooo, let's go do stuff!" Which . . . thanks, subconscious. I'm glad you're happy. I'm glad you're looking forward to everything that we're doing today.
But . . . seriously. Go back to sleep. Or have a dream once in a while, would you? Because I am looking a little hollow around the eyes.
Hi Miss Alli!
First let me say your recaps on TWoP make my entire week!! And, most of my friends entire weeks too! I've never left a comment here before but as somebody who has also woken up every day at 4am for no apparent reason before I thought maybe I could offer a few suggestions:
1) early waking is usually a sign of anxiety. It could be something that you don't even know you're anxious about that your subconscious is fixating on. The key is to identify what it is that's making you anxious. Talking to a therapist or someone can be helpful here if that's something you're interested in (it worked for me!)
2) Tips for getting back to sleep, whatever is causing your problem. Over the counter sleep aids are not usually helpful because most of them are designed for people who have trouble falling asleep. You have to sleep for 6 hours or so to fully kick the drug out of your system, which can leave you groggy if you take it at 4am and only sleep for 2. If you do want to try one I recommend Tylenol Simply Sleep, which is basically Tylenol PM minus the painkiller.
The best trick I learned was just to get out of bed altogether, nothing keeps you awake more than lying in bed wondering why you can't sleep. Then do something that engages your brain, like writing a letter or to do lists or something. Try to stay away from the TV or the computer (I know, totally not easy), something about the artificial light throws your body off and can actually make it harder to go back to sleep. I used to leave thank you notes and making flashcards (I'm a medical student) and other busywork for that time. Don't get back into bed until you really do feel tired and if you do and you're still wide awake in 20 mins get up again.
This is getting really long. I have a ton more information if you're interested, feel free to drop me an e-mail, kimwfu01@hotmail.com. I hope this was helpful! Good luck getting back to sleep!
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at 04:08 PM on 01.26.05
[ link ]Hmmm. I'm not a doctor, but I'm wondering if you don't have a vitamin deficiency problem.
Or perhaps a former occupant of your apartment was brutally murdered at 4:00 AM and parts of him were buried in the walls and under the floorboards and now his restless spirit has siphoned off enough of your energy to partially manifest itself and force you awake every morning at the hour the crime was committed...
As I say though, I'm not a doctor.
at 04:08 PM on 01.26.05
[ link ]I am also almost always awake at 4 am - it's always 4 am, too, never 3 or 5. I've found no prescription or over-the-counter drug to help me, but what has - and you're going to think I'm a total nut job for saying this - is reading the phone book. Previously, when I had trouble going back to sleep, I'd read a book or answer email or whatever until 7 am, when I would start getting ready for work. But those things interest me, and I wouldn't really have a motivation for going back to sleep. The phone book, though? That's boring. I read the white pages, too, not even the yellow pages, because the yellow pages have ads which could be construed and interesting. And after about ten minutes of other people's phone numbers.... I'm out cold. Hope that helps - I sympathize with you, Linda.
at 04:08 PM on 01.26.05
[ link ]For me it's always exactly 3:11 a.m. (You 4 a.m. people are freaks! Freaks, I tell you!) And like you, I find it's a cyclical thing. My very mundane theory is that there's something in my environment niggling at my subconscious - like a train blowing its whistle or a neighbor coming home from shift work or something - every few weeks for days at a time at exactly 3:11 a.m. Or it could be that dead body thing. One never knows.
Incidentally, Tylenol PM is just Tylenol with Benadryl so I just take a couple of Benadryl instead. This actually works better than the prescription meds I was taking for non-restorative sleep.
at 04:08 PM on 01.26.05
[ link ]I have had spells of this sort on occasion... and yes, awakening right around 4 a.m., for weeks on end. The worst was 3 years back, and it was easy to guess what might be bothering me (if anything in fact was): I was responsible for a major event of a type I'd never had to deal with before, and the process took months, and any number of things could have gone wrong that wouldn't be my doing but for which I would be responsible. But then last summer it happened again for no apparent reason at all (luckily I'm not on a tight teaching schedule during the summer), and went away as mysteriously. Personally, I never find that the "knowing why" helps a bit. It goes away in its good time. But it's a pain while it's happening, that's for sure. It does help a bit at least, if (as you recount) you're able to make use of the time and get things done before breakfast.
at 04:08 PM on 01.26.05
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