Fifteen years ago I complained to my psychiatrist that I was waking up every two hours. I'd go back to sleep only to wake up again two hours latter. He said, "as long as you're getting a total of eight you're good". Well that didn't work out so well. I would eventually have a psychotic break that landed me in prison.

The medications I was on at the time were 450mg of venlafaxine, 450 of bupropion and 900mg go Lithium.

After my initial thirty days in jail, where they took away all of my mediation at once, that was fun! I was put right back on the same load of medication. My sleep which had been non existent in jail resumed the same two hour pattern. This went on for years.

Eventually I was put on 300 mg of Seroquel to help me sleep. I did sometimes stay a sleep for seven or eight hours but I would wake up tired and suicidally depressed even though I was on massive quantities of antidepressants. I also gained sixty pounds in short order with no end in sight.

In July I did a bunch of research and it became clear that my psyche meds were making me sick. Seroquel being one of the worst offenders. I have since titrated off of seven psychiatric meds, Seroquel being one of the first to go. My sleep immediately went back to the same two hour cycle.

I have been tracking my sleep with my Apple watch and another sleep tracker. Some patterns are becoming clear. If I do not have at least twenty minutes of deep sleep I wake up feeling pretty terrible, physically and emotionally. Therefore my focus is on trying to maximize the amount of deep sleep I get.

I eat a very healthy diet.
I do not eat within three hours of bed time.
I go to bed and get up the same time everyday.
I limit my caffeine consumption to the morning only.
I exercise two hours a day, might seem like a lot, but two out of twenty four is less then ten percent.
I take a daily multivitamin.
I take 200mg of magnesium L-Threonate.
I take 5000 IU of vitamins D3
I put away my iPad thirty minutes before bed.
And I drink a cup of chamomile tea before bed, just because I like it.
Sometimes I take a hot shower same reason, I like it.
Lately I've been listening to Sounds for Deep Sleep. I'm not sure this does anything but the music is nice.

I wish I could say that I'm sleeping through the night but no. I am however sleeping in longer and longer chunks. Last night it I got one three and a half hour chunk followed by another three hour chunk. Last week I actually slept seven hours straight once. More importantly my sleep tracker is showing a steady increase in "deep" sleep. Who knows if the actual numbers are accurate. All I care about is the rate of change.

In addition to the above I've lost thirty pounds (thirty more to go) something I believe is responsible for reduced snoring.

I've been really sick for a long time. In June I was on fourteen different meds, today I am on one. I am a research nut and I can state with certainty that the psych meds and even some of the side effect meds messed up how my body functions. It is my hope that by ridding my body of all of these toxins, including the garbage food I was eating, my system will rebalance itself. I wasn't always like this. I think my body knows what it needs to do. I just have to hang on long enough.

When I mentioned to psychiatric provider that I was not sleeping she immediately offered to prescribe one of two new sleep meds. I looked them up. First page, first entry was a citation from Mayo Clinic stating clearly that the recommended medication should not be taken with the one remaining psych med I am on. My PCP wanted to send me for a sleep study before reviewing the meds I was on. A urologist wanted to put a scope up my penis to see if I was waking up because I had to pee.

Modern medicine knows every little about achieving good sleep. They can put me to sleep. They can keep me a sleep, as doctor did for Michael Jackson until it killed him. In my case they put me out for Electro Convulsive Therapy and I woke up paralyzed. Lucky for me a nurse noticed and put me back under. Never mind the hallucinations I had during Covid treatment.

I badly want to sleep, if just to escape the grief I feel, I know what it is like to lay awake a two o'clock in the morning wishing I had a way to kill myself. But Im pretty much done with medical interventions. The best a doctor from one of the finest hospitals in the world had to offer was, "just relax, your body will eventually go to sleep".

Why is it so hard for doctors to just say, "I don't know" lets see what we can figure out together.

There is a ton of stuff oneline about achieving quality sleep. The list of things I do are the steps that are widely supported by unbiased (non Big Pharma) research. Maybe one or more might help you.

I hope you find sleep and peace you deserve.