I don't want to go to sleep at night

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I dread going to bed every night. I don't know what I"m afraid of, but I stay up as long as I can even though it means I'll oversleep in the morning. And that is causing real damage in my life.
Serious damage.

Why can't I put myself to bed?

In the daylight hours, I'm only too happy to take a nap, or even sleep all day (well, I used to years ago when I was single and free) -so what is my problem with going to bed at a reasonable hour??

I'm really pissed off with myself, because I know that tomorrow I'm going to f**k everything up - again - and need to come up with more excuses - again- and I'm so sick of myself and this stupidness!

I can relate. I've had trouble with sleeping for years. Have you ever tried sleeping pills? They didn't do much for me (except help me get high ) but some people found them helpful.

I'm tired but I won't go to bed. I'm too lazy to get up and brush my teeth and go to bed.

Melatonin. doesn't get me high, but puts me to sleep.

I relate too well with what you're saying.

Sounds like the same issue I have - Executive Dysfunction.

It isn't insomnia - the inability to sleep, but rather a matter of not wanting to get up & go to bed. Or, as I have tried to describe it to others - difficulty negotiating all the tasks that must be accomplished to make it from my chair at the computer to the bed in my bedroom.

I'm still struggling with this - it's something that has been an issue for me my entire life. But here is what works best for me.

I make my "bedtime routine" part of my daily schedule. Starting at 10 p.m., I have a snack, watch a video, brush my teeth & go to bed (by midnight - ideally.) It takes me a while - but tends to work. (When it doesn't work, I end up checking my e-mail & the Internet, over & over until 2 a.m.)

For me, it really became necessary to break it down into tasks that must be accomplished by specific times - little "deadlines" that I must keep.

This person - http://thiswayoflife.org/ef.html - uses checklists.

I used to be the same, and still think that if I worked through the night I'd be able to sleep all day...but I've found that relaxing and chilling out (reading, watching film etc) is a really good way to relax before bed. Sleeping pills are a last resort. They knock you out in twenty minutes but some people sleep through their alarms the next day.

How do you resist the urge to make use of this quiet peaceful time of day, and comfortable furniture(your bed), to sit and think?


I've slept about 4~8 hours in the last three days I think... this is normal for me, most of my time in bed is laying there thinking, different for you guys?

I can tell you as a mother of two small children: sleeping well is not something you are born with. It is something we are trained to do, and that training sometimes doesn't happen effectively or can go wrong. I don't know if you knew this but small infants can actually get day and night confused and you have to "re-train" them. So you have this baby that has slept well and suddenly she is up wide-awake all night, and sleeping all day.

I would suggest back to basics: No caffeine after noon, GET SOME DAYLIGHT (this is #1 important, even with infants and small children). Daylight resets your body clock. Get exercise in the daytime - take a walk outside or do something active. Then, in the evening, the last couple hours prior to target bedtime are stimulation-low hours. If your target bedtime is 11, at 8 or 9:00 you turn off anything stimulating (online activities, loud music, bright lights).

It may take a few days and commitment but I think the first step is realizing it doesn't come naturally - anyone can get off track.

I'm fine with napping during the day. As a matter of fact I love to nap. I'm very fond of my bedtime routine, though. I love to choose my pajamas, change, refill my cpap, read a final chapter, and...go to bed to fall asleep.

Vivienne
woah it could be ME who wrote all single words of yours in this. We are pretty much in the same situation and I feel just as you. It doesnt make it easier either with the fact that I do not have a regular job on daytime, forcing me to go to bed on a more decent time of the day...

Im a nightperson and have always been. During wintertime I hardly see daylight at all because I tend to sleep through it all the time and wake up when the sun goes down, if it was up at all...

I dont feel Im affraid of anything, its more that I like life the best during the nights but it do makes trouble sometimes as the entirely society is built on people doing things on daytime..

zeichner
Very intersting input of yours. It never ever crossed my mind that it can actually be a condition behind this I call bad habit of mine....I first dont want to go to bed and when I finally do, usually around 3-4 am then I sleep in about 10 hours in a row....gosh what much Im missing in life sleeping like this...mostly to get things done as Im extremely slow...
To get routines sounds like a good plan. Then comes the next problem: Dicipline...

Same crap here. I'm naturally more alert at night...

Quoting Vivienne

I have had this problem for a very long time. Going to bed at night used to be such a pleasurable experience at the end of a long day. Now, I dread it. I can be feeling perfectly fine until I get into bed and turn out the light. Then I start noticing all kinds of disturbing bodily sensations, heart rhythm, breathing, stomach and abdominal spasms, restless leg symptoms, husband snoring, mind racing or inner dialogue that goes on and on, fears of impending doom, and sometimes, though fortunately not often, maybe once or twice a month, a kind of seizure with symptoms of tachycardia which I have to medicate in order to get back into a normal rhythm. It feels like my bed has become a torture chamber. These things rarely if ever happen during the daylight hours. I can take a nap with no problem. It's only when I get into bed at night that these things happen to me. I have been thinking about staying up as far into the night as possible, down stairs on the couch, until I can no longer keep my eyes open. I wish I knew what this was all about and put an end to it. I wish I had some good advice for you, but I don't. Just wanted to let you know you are not the only one who experiences these things. Hope you can find some relief.

The thing that keeps me from wanting to get to bed, is the Internet. I want to stay up and keep posting here. I don't want to go through all the trouble of getting ready to go to bed. There are some nights that I'm on here, until 11 and than I'm up and on here for an hour, three hours later. I find the Internet world to be nicer than my dream world, sometimes.

For me it used to be a fear of losing control. You never really know when you fall asleep. I used to hate not knowing. And also a side fear that I would never wake up

I still don't like going to sleep, or waking up. I love sleep itself though.

For me there is always "one more thing" to do. A new post, another song, another anime episode, another chapter of a book, what have you. I feel sleeping is a waste of time at points. I love it is itself though....

I've always had this problem too. I'm a night person because I get headaches from noise and light so nighttime is the only time I can have peace and sometimes even headache-free periods. So naturally I like to put off sleep as long as possible even if I have to get up early in the morning. This poses a problem though because I also get a headache if I don't get enough sleep.

Another reason I put off sleep is that unless I am a certain amount of tired I will lie in bed for hours and my mind usually drifts to bad places. I don't know what the certain amount of tired is but I know that if I'm not tired enough I'll lie there forever, and it's the same if I'm overtired. And by "bad places", I mean that my mind won't stop and I usually end up driving myself crazy replaying all the conversations from the day and how they might have gone differently, or else conversations I might have tomorrow. Sometimes I hit a bad day and my mind goes to darker places of depression and I get myself all upset, though these bad days have happened a lot less in the last year since I discovered AS and have found peace within myself for the first time in my life.

Yet a third reason for delaying sleep is typical laziness and procrastination. I think of all the steps involved in going to bed and I think I don't really want to do them. And, knowing what I'm like, I know that if I put it off long enough I can convince myself that it's okay if I skip that step since it's too late and I really need to get to bed.

Wow, this is long now, but it's helped me to put off my sleep until 2am, which is what I was aiming for when I came here tonight. Kind of funny how that worked out so well.

Edit: I meant to add that when I was little I used to also hate going to bed because I was afraid that the house would set fire in the middle of the night. Don't know why I felt that so strongly, but I used to have to set up everything I treasured so I could easily grab it if I had to hurry out of the house.

I can kinda relate. I'm the kind of person who likes to stay up as late as possible, and I struggle to get to sleep. Unfortunately if I really struggle to go to sleep and it's really late, I panic because I then worry I'm never going to get sleep. To calm me down, I say in my head that eventually I will get to sleep.