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3:49am May 4, 2015
Anonymous asked: P.S. I don't know if this will happen to you (your body probably works very differently from mine) but i used to take melatonin for sleep and it ultimately backfired horribly and caused me to wake up every hour of the night whenever i took it. hopefully that won't happen to you bc it sounds like it's helping a lot! but i figured i'd mention it as something that might potentially happen so it doesn't blindside you if it does (which it hopefully won't).

I wake up every hour of the night anyway – it can’t get much worse than it already is.  (I have a circadian disorder called Irregular Sleep-Wake Pattern.  It basically means that without meds, I sleep in two-hour chunks at random points around the clock.  Well almost random – we tend to sleep more in the late-early-morning times and also afternoon.  But mostly it’s random.  Or else I don’t sleep at all.)

With melatonin, I sleep a little longer and my sleep is more concentrated in the night and early morning.  But it’s not enough, so I’m seeing a sleep specialist soon.

Also I’ve read that with melatonin you should take a break every few weeks, what you’re describing might be why.  I need to remember to do that.  It’s not meant for continuous, long-term use.

When I wasn’t on steroids, and was on a bunch of meds that were sedating at bedtime (not on purpose, they just happened to all cluster at that one time of day) I sometimes went from irregular sleep-wake pattern to something closer to non-24-hour sleep-wake syndrome.  Unfortunately, the steroids make it so I never entirely leave irregular sleep-wake pattern, it just changes when the 2-hour chunks happen.  Although tonight I slept for 3.5 hours at a time which is nearly a record for me on an average day anyway.  (Sometimes I don’t sleep for 3 days, and then sleep for several days.  And one time after a very painful procedure I pretty much passed out from pain any time I woke up, so if that counts as sleeping I slept for an entire day.)

Notes:
  1. withasmoothroundstone posted this