I feel perpetually sleepy.
I have a hard time napping during the day- scratch that I can’t nap during the day. My anxiety makes it impossible. However the second I crack open a book I feel like I’m going to pass out. It’s very strange.
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If you have access to it, consider getting a sleep study done. There’s a bunch of different things that can cause daytime sleepiness that all need to be treated in different ways. If it’s something like sleep apnea it’s really important to get it treated ASAP.
It’s super annoying too because you’re not going to necessarily have any idea anything unusual is happening after you go to sleep, unless you have a partner that brings it up.
Also if you don’t exercise and get good cardio in daily, anxiety and sleep will be issues by default. It’s crazy how sedentary some of us are. If I don’t exercise for a week, I get massive anxiety, am unreasonably tired during the day but can’t sleep well, and the next few days my pores are dripping sweat, until I get back on cardio track and go back to not sweating much.
Cardio is as evolutionarily necessary and inbuilt for humans as pooping and sleeping, and – funny thing if you’ve experienced a panic attack before, you just feel like you have to run. It’s insane how much gunk is cleaned out of your largest bodily organ when you run. From pouring stinky sweat for a couple days to barely sweating. And the sleep, energy and mood quality difference is also insane.
There are obviously other factors that can cause these issues, but if you don’t exercise and eat right, and you’re experiencing depression, anxiety, lack of energy, and sleep problems… Well, what’s the saying, “if you stink, try a shower before bleach injections.”
agree with everything you said here, but if im not the pedant someone else will be – sedentary, not sedimentary. At least I don’t like to think I’m sediment
Thanks, I thought the root word felt off as I was typing it.
it happens, they’re super close :) i know I’ve made worse mistakes lol
speak for yourself
Agreed on the cardio thing. I run pretty regularly but a knee injury has put stop to that for the last month or so and I’ve just been miserable and bad tempered. Last time I felt like this was when I quit smoking.
If it’s something like sleep apnea it’s really important to get it treated ASAP.
Sleep apnea is also linked to heart diseases, it’s a really serious thing to left unchecked.
To add to this, get your blood work done. You could have a lack of iron or something.
Mostly tired of being alive. It’s terrible out there.
I feel you on this.
Used to, then I started jogging 30 minutes a day
Good advice. Cardio won’t fix fatigue, but a lack of cardio will induce it. It’s an easy place for OP to start, and if they still feel fatigue after two weeks of daily cardio they know to look elsewhere.
I workout an hour on the elliptical every day and get sweaty AF. I go pretty hard.
I was falling asleep all the time and all the places. Found out at the age of 23 I had a cyst in my brain blocking the liquids inside my head from flowing freely, thus affecting the whole of me in various and weird ways. Felt like shit growing up and hating everything. One brain surgery later, with complications of course, because why not? I felt like a completely new person, for good and for bad.
In what sense for bad?
I had spasms during the procedure with a bleeding in my brain as a result. Took me almost a year of getting back on my feet. But today I am super grateful to have a completely different possibility on life. This was ages ago today, but I carry it with me almost everyday.
ADHD, major depressive disorder, and bipolar 2.
Yea. Tired. All the time.
Even worse when you’ve been tired af the whole day but as soon as you lay in bed you are wide awake and it takes an hour to finally fall asleep.
Oh yes, I hate this and it happens often. But slowly less after trying to be more fit.
Things that might be helpful for people in here:
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Get iron levels checked. A lot of people are actually pretty low. Make sure doctor using more recent reference ranges, as there’s been a lot of bad outdated info about iron and infusions
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Glycine. It lowers your core body temperature when taking before bed which puts you into deep sleep faster and more frequently so you end up waking up feeling more rested with the same amount of sleep
Also, get a sleep study for sleep apnea. “It is estimated to affect 10% to 30% of adults in the United States but in many cases goes undiagnosed”. -National Sleep Foundation
Glycine
Thanks for this tip, I dont have trouble sleeping generally but my partner does, will look into this for him
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Speaking from only my own last issues that were similar: I had a massive vitamin D deficiency. Was tired but had issues sleeping. Became depressed etc. Finally had blood work done/doc visit when I started having suicidal thoughts.
OP, just schedule a doc visit tomorrow morning, plz.
I’ve been taking 5,000 ius of vitamin d every day!
I’d still recommend getting a blood test. I live in the United States’s Pacific Northwest and I have to take 10k IUs every day to hit low normal in the winter. Don’t do that on your own without testing, it’s a huge dose. I just seem to absorb it poorly.
In case you also live in a similar area, I also use a sunrise lamp and a SAD light all fall and winter long and it makes a huge difference in my energy levels and overall motivation.
5000 ius is a lot. You shouldn’t be taking that much unless it’s doctors orders.
You could be taking too much. ~2,000 is a safer “just take it” dose
Another thing is your iron levels. A lot of people are chronically low in iron, especially pre-Menopausal women.
Yes, but it’s because of multiple sleep disorders and neurological disorders. It’s best to get a polysomnogram to determine if you have anything wrong with your sleep patterns. If that yields nothing, then a CAT scan may be in order to determine if anything is wrong inside your skull. If that also returns normal, then at least you’re otherwise healthy.
Source: had to go through all of this
I found out in January that, every now and then, when I’m asleep, my heart stops for extended periods. 8 seconds, 5 seconds, 4 seconds.
I wore a heart monitor all March and it happened 3 times. But never when I’m awake.
Now I have a hard time sleeping. (3:48 AM)
I hope you’re seeing a doctor or medical professional about that. An unsteady heartbeat can be very serious.
A bunch of them! Yeah! Next step is a long term monitor under the skin. If it’s happening during the day, that’s a quick trip to a pacemaker. :(
Yes, unfortunately. It’s something that I’m working on with multiple doctors and practitioners, and so far we’ve gone through some of the usual suspects (Vitamin D levels, checking thyroid function, making sure I wasn’t diabetic - already had my doubts on that one but I’m not the one with the medical degree I suppose…, etc).
My mental health isn’t always the best, so I’m trying to get that worked on as well because bad mental health can cause lethargy and chronic fatigue (it’s a two-way street though, the reverse applies too)… Unfortunately a lot of mental health meds have fatigue as a side effect which doesn’t help my case. It also doesn’t help that I have Crohn’s disease, and any autoimmune/chronic condition in general can also cause chronic fatigue.
I don’t know, I still feel like the root cause of it is an imbalance of something, but that’s my best “gut instinct” guess - I have nothing concrete to base that off of. It feels like all of the things I’m trying are just attempting to “brute force” the issues away, rather than treating whatever is the root cause, but I digress… All I know is, it feels like the game was rigged against me from the start.
Hey thanks for sharing all about what you’re going through. Life sucks sometimes, and I have no doubt my anxiety disorder plays a large role in why I’m fatigued. At least we have kind people online to commiserate with, and understand that we’re not alone.
Of course! I don’t know if my ramblings will help at all, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to share regardless :)
Anxiety is awful for me. When it hits, I just want to take a nap the rest of the day.
I suspect I get mild SAD in the winters. Not enough to feel truly depressed, just more of a constant low-level “damn, I wanna nap right now.”
It’s probably different from your case, but what helped me was a sunlight lamp (light therapy) and a grab bag of supplements - standard multivitamins as well as magnesium pills and vitamin D fortified milk.
Suss out medical causes through blood work, sleep study, etc. Work with your Dr on this.
Also work on sleep hygiene. Strict routime (go to bed and wake up at the same time every day), comfortable bed, cool dark room, preparation (nothing exciting, no screen use, no caffeine leading up to bed time), and mindset (we sometimes use headspace to help with bed time anxiety). My anxious kid has a weighted blanket and that helped him a lot.
Exercise during the day helps a lot with sleep and general well-being. I feel better and sleep better when I avoid sugar.
I don’t know how to learn decisiveness but I believe it can be learned through practice and I believe that being decisive helps you sleep. You know you did what you thought was right, there is less worrying about your decisions afterwards. My other son and I are this way and we sleep like babies. Speculation, there is definitely a correlation there for us so maybe it is causal.
My brother was sleepy all the time. It came to a head when he fell asleep at the wheel. Luckily the car drifted off the road onto a grass verge and no-one was hurt. Turned out he had sleep apnea - his breathing stopped time and again through the night, waking him. He never ever had a good deep sleep. He now has a CPAP machine that keeps his airways open while he sleeps. He says he’s a new man.
