For the last two weeks my sleep has been really rough while my SIBO has been minimal and my weight has been on an increase finally. I never sleep great but usually I can eek out 7.5-8 hours per night with a few wake ups in there but since coming back from Iowa early in the month I have been progressively sleeping less and less with many more interruptions in my sleep. For the last week, at least, my pattern is to fall asleep no problem, wake up 2 hours later and then fall back asleep after maybe a bit of reading. I then wake up again 1.5-2 hours after that feeling pretty wide awake, my body thinks it is 4:30 in the morning and it is 1:00. I then never really sleep great after that, I’ll doze off and wake up again every few minutes. Some mornings I crash again around 4:30 and finally crawl out of bed between 5:30-6:30.
This isn’t new. I posted about my sleep hacking experiments earlier in the year when I switched to blue blocker glasses and self-hypnosis to get to sleep. All that worked for a while but I was back into a bad sleep pattern in April. I still use the funny glasses but the auto-hypnosis and audio books have sort of stopped working. Even the Dude isn’t putting me to sleep at the moment which is unusual, his Temescal Canyon track always did the trick until the last week. I’ve tried crazy things like honey, honey with apple cider vinegar on the theory it is late night hypoglycemia but that did nothing. I’ve tried 200mg of Zen which seemed to work for a bit then stopped. I’m now trying Cortisol Manager to see if that has an effect, it didn’t last night at least. The only thing that works is my old friend Gdp but that isn’t a good long-term solution to the problem, can cause a SIBO relapse and I know I’m just self medicating when I use it. I really don’t want anything to do with benzos again and the Ambien family of drugs scares the crap out of me.
What’s changed? Well, I did start drinking coffee after coming back from Iowa. I drink one cold brew coffee in the morning, usually only about 6 oz. of coffee mixed with 6 oz. of coconut milk and I do it first thing in the morning. Could that level of caffeine be giving me grief? It is possible so as of this morning I’m back off the coffee and will stick to my matcha tea which didn’t seem to keep me awake. I did fine without coffee for over a year and can go back to doing fine without it.
My morning meditation has faltered a bit over the last few weeks too. Part of it is that I’ll end up finally falling asleep at 4:30 and then sleep “in” until 6 or so at which time I need to get up and eat some food since I’m starving after 12-13 hours of no food. I am going to be sure to sit, even if it is for a shorter period of time, each day.
Now for some good news – my extra calories seem to be working. I’ve gone from 151 to 155 in the two weeks I’ve been consciously trying to eat 4000 calories per day. But, the question that comes up for me – are these extra carbs contributing to the sleep issue? Could be a coincidence but it also seems that when I added in extra carbs that my sleep deteriorated.
From the reading I’ve been doing the fact I fall asleep no problem but wake up probably points to an adrenal/cortisol issue and looking back at my adrenal test from April it does appear that I’m a bit extreme on the highs and lows so that could be the key. I noticed that the Remarks section said that elevated early morning levels could be associated with insomnia so that fits this graph and my symptoms pretty well.
Anyway, it is time to get serious about this. After doing some searching I found The Institute for Naturopathic Sleep Medicine in Seattle run by Dr. Catherine Darley. I’ve set up an appointment for later this week. I’ll post about what I find.