As I mentioned in my last post, I have been dealing with some middle of the night (or sometimes early in the night) insomnia for the last month and decided to go to a sleep clinic to see what I could do.    I had the appointment on Wednesday and, of course, on Monday and Tuesday nights slept like a baby for over 9 hours each night, I think I had hit the point of total exhaustion.

On Wednesday I headed into Seattle to The Institute for Naturopathic Sleep Medicine to see Catherine Darley, ND.   We spent an hour going over my sleep history, especially this latest bout of insomnia, and going over my test results from April/May when I last had sleep issues.  Sure enough she keyed in on my cortisol graph which was pretty much off the charts high in the morning when I woke up and her take was that it was probably even higher off the charts high sometime around 2-3 a.m. when I usually wake up and have the hardest time going back to sleep.   Ultimately we came up with a plan for the next several weeks that involves:

• Adrenal Response Formula – 1 tablet in the morning with breakfast for one week then increase to 2 tablets in the morning.  I don’t have this yet and it may have guar gum which I’m allergic to so I may need a different formula.
• Seriphos – 100mg at bedtime
• Eating a snack at bedtime which I had started doing on Monday when I slept well
• For the next two weeks restrict my sleep time to 6.5 hours by going to sleep at 10 and waking up at the ungodly hour of 4:30 with Catherine.  The goal of sleep restriction is to try and increase sleep efficiency first and then start slowly increasing the time in bed.
• If I wake up for what feels like more than 10 minutes get out of bed, go to the living room and read a paper book (what the heck are those????) an the couch returning to bed only when really sleepy.
• If awake go into a sleep strategy – deep breathing exercises or my favorite which is factoring numbers
• Keep the cell phone out of the bedroom.  That has been my crutch using audio books and sleep tapes to get to sleep when I can’t just get to sleep.

I’ve only had one night at the restricted schedule and I only woke up once for > 10 minutes.  I went out to the couch and read but read my iPad since I didn’t have a paper book at the time to read (I’ve since gone to the library and picked one up).  I read about 15 minutes and went back to bed and fell asleep pretty quickly so that was pretty successful. I’m tired as heck right now though from only sleeping around 6 hours last night and I need to stay up another 3 hours still.  I can tell in two weeks I’m either going to be dragging or used to only sleeping 6 hours.

SIBO still going good and my weight was up to 155.8 yesterday!   This is an almost 5 lbs. gain in the last two weeks.