Seriously, I've found a long-term solution. It costs less than two refills of Ambien, and I want other people to know about it. I know there are lots of other long-term, chronic insomniacs out there, and I know what they go through. It's like a secret society that we all want desperately to escape from.
Having been an insomniac for literally almost all of my life, I recently reached my rope's end and decided that I was going to start sleeping normally or die trying. That may sound like an exaggeration but if you suffer from chronic sleeplessness you know that it often makes you feel like your life isn't even worth living. You know what I'm talking about-nights full of dread and days full of forgetfulness, inexplicable mistakes, mood swings, and generally feeling like you're falling apart.
It seems to me that the worst part of long-term insomnia is the hopelessness it drills into you. I know that as I tried every single remedy and piece of advice known to man, all to no avail, my hopelessness became like a giant, immovable boulder that I thought I would never be able to push away. I've tried everything and nothing works, I thought, so I'll just have to learn to live with this. And when I say I tried everything, I mean EVERYTHING.
Getting out of bed and doing something is the first thing everybody tells you to do. Don't lie there all anxious, thinking about how you're not sleeping. Fine. I'd get up and do something, and continue doing something for hours into the night, until it was so late that even though I would eventually fall asleep, it would only be three hours or so until I had to wake up.
Booze got me to sleep, but only to wake up a few hours later thirsty and dying to pee. From then on I'd sleep fitfully until the morning, when I'd crawl out of bed haggard, hungover and truly in worse shape than if I'd just stayed awake for most of the night.
Herbal teas made me feel warm and fuzzy inside like a patchouli-smelling hippie, but as a sleep aid they were pretty much a joke.
Valerian, the ancient sleep-aiding herb, worked for about two nights, then I had a tolerance to it. It also smells and tastes like raw dirt and made me feel very anxious.
Over-the-counter drugs like Sominex and Tylenol PM knocked me out in no time, but they put me in such a deep artificially-induced state of sleep that waking up to my alarm the next day felt like coming out of a coma. I'd feel groggy and slightly dumb the whole day, and often get a headache mid-morning. Even worse, if I'd take them before a day off, with no alarm, I'd sleep 10 hours or more and wake up feeling like I'd just risen from the dead, with no idea which way was was up. Besides, acetaminophen, the main ingredient, can damage your liver, and I've already done enough damage to my liver.
Melatonin may work for some people but I've always found that it stays in my system too long, bringing on sudden bouts of intense drowsiness at random moments of my day when I really need to be awake and aware. This may work as a short-term solution for people with occasional insomnia, but for hard cases like me it just doesn't cut it.
Prescription aids like Ambien seem like a godsend at first, and after years of not having insurance the first thing I did when I got a decent plan was talk a doctor into getting me some of these magic pills. Everyone says that the first time they took Ambien was pretty intense, and my experience was no exception. Let me just say that it felt like falling asleep at 100 mph, and I actually felt alright the next day. "I've found it!" I thought, bounding joyously to the kitchen for breakfast.
As I continued taking them, however, their effectiveness wore off, until I could sometimes take one and not even fall asleep, just stay awake in a bizarre, very intoxicated dreamlike state that made me insensitive and unaware of what I was saying and doing. I almost lost a girlfriend once because I was such a douchebag on the phone late one night while in this state-I kept making jokes and laughing about the funeral she had just been to! It took me two days to convince her that it had been the Ambien talking, not me. I tried doubling the dosage, which did get me to sleep but left me feeling like the over-the-counter pills did, with the added element of forgetfulness. In fact, I eventually noticed that I was forgetting little things all the time while I was on this stuff.
The no-alcohol rule with these pills is no joke, either. One night, soon after going on Ambien, I went out and had a few beers. I didn't take any pills that night, thinking I would be okay, that you just weren't supposed to take them at the same time. I was basically retarded the next day, forgetting things every ten minutes and acting goofy to the point where people asked me if I was okay. Even having traces of Ambien left in my system from the night before made alcohol a no-no. The truly terrifying part was that I was aware of how dumb and forgetful and weird I was acting, and had no idea if I would ever get better or not. I did, but decided that my intelligence and memory weren't worth risking just for a good night's sleep.
Besides all of this, once you start taking Ambien you are pretty much dependent on it, not in the drug-addict sense of having painful withdrawal if you stop, but in that you will probably find it fairly difficult to get to sleep without it. There are exceptions to this I'm sure, but I've never met anyone for whom Ambien or any other pills were a real, long-term solution.
Occasional insomnia is one thing, and if this is your problem you should experiment with the treatments listed above, but serious, chronic inability to sleep is something that has to be attacked from an entirely different angle. I finally found that angle.
At first, the basic structure of the Lose Your Insomnia site-first you take a brief sleep quiz, then get the results after you give them your first name and e-mail address-made me wonder. At this point I think we're all pretty cynical about giving out our e-mail just for information, not to mention endlessly scrolling pages that try to sell us something. There are even a few spelling and grammar errors on this one but the guy who invented the method is French and maybe just tried to write all of the copy himself, without a translator or copywriter. If that is indeed the case, and he only made those few mistakes, then he did a fabulous job. And I did notice that he never resorts to that overbearing, hard-sell talk we've seen on so many similar sites. (NOTE: Since giving them my e-mail and buying the product, I have not received a bunch of spam.)
What overcame my skepticism was the fact that this has no pills or quick-fix miracles. It's a set of three CDs of what I would call quiet soundtrack music that actually goes to the source of your sleep disorder and brings out the right brainwaves required to sleep soundly and regularly. It essentially re-trains your brain to sleep well every night. If you think about it, years of chronic insomnia that you continually make worse by worrying is basically training your brain not to sleep, so it only makes sense that a re-training is necessary.
You also get access to a series of videos on the site, and while they looked like they'd be pretty cheesy I watched them anyway and they turned out to be awesome. A lot of what they said was stuff I'd already heard researching insomnia online but something about hearing it all delivered in this soothing, authoritative voice that never sounds like a huckster or a doctor telling you what to do made it very effective. They completely changed my whole outlook on sleep, and after watching them I was already going to bed in a relaxed state and falling asleep most of the time. When I started listening to the CDs that was it.
It costs $79.95, which seemed a little steep but really isn't much compared to the $50 my Ambien refills used to cost me, even with insurance. And when I think about the unproductive hours, days, weeks, even months(!) my insomnia has caused me over the course of my life, it's nothing to pay. Now that I'm living like a normal person again, sleeping every night and waking up feeling great, I can say that there is no possible monetary value for the energy I have. (And in any case, I make a lot more money now.) It's an amazing feeling.
It may work for you, too. Check it out at www.loseyourinsomnia.com
