This Is What Insomnia Feels Like

I can't sleep. OK, that's not quite true - I can fall asleep, sure. The problem is that I can't stay that way. I'm writing this and it's 3:00 a.m., which isn't out of the ordinary for me. (There's your problem! I can hear some of you saying.) Most nights I wake up some time between 2:00 and 4:00 and stay up for a few excruciating hours, the kind where you can feel every minute pass. It's been this way for almost two years. By now, friends and family are used to getting replies to their texts at really strange hours. At first, no one was too concerned. I'm a college student - I was probably stressed about all the work I had to do, staying up too late working on projects, drinking too much the night before. But I'm one of those rare breeds of students (especially at my school, Emerson College, where everyone is working on at least 400 projects at any given time) who feels like my workload is more than manageable. As time went on and things got worse, I told my doctor. She thinks it's a medication side effect. I'm on a few different medications for a few different things. One of them is pretty well known for causing insomnia. One of them, however, happens to function as a mild sedative, which, in addition to treating what it's supposed to (which it does, and very well at that), we hoped would help me sleep. It has not. But it means I can't exactly be prescribed sleeping aids. (A cardinal rule of drugs: don't mix downers and downers!) It's probably for the best, though: have...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news