at what point in your insomnia do you give up and decide to remain awake?

because, if you have to go to work the next day, then you're basically committing to stay up for another entire day while having to be productive. on the other hand, if you only have 3 hours left before you have to get up, falling asleep now would mean a 100% chance of sleeping through the alarm (for me) and being super late to work.

share your insomnia stories here!

usually only if i make it past 6am

before that its like "hey i can still get in....90 minutes!"

man. i am the deepest sleeper ever. i would never wake up after only 90 min of sleep... (i have 3 alarm clocks and sometimes i manage to turn them all off in my sleep)

if I can't get at least an hour and a half sleep I won't wake up. My alarm with become a sound in my dream. I don't struggle with it as much as I used. Now I have trained my body to know when I'm working and when I'm laid off and can stay up. For years I worked the grave yard shift at a cafe and took almost as many years to recover from it.

with less than 3 and a half hours of sleep possible, staying awake will feel better than getting that reduced sleep time. i either start scheming, thinking of excuses not to go to work, or get excited by the prospect of how easy it will be to fall asleep after not sleeping for so long (eyes close, bam).

otm

If I have to get up for 7AM and I'm still awake past 3, then I'll stay awake rather than try to get to sleep. Because if I do get to sleep, I'll wake up at 11AM or something.

I usually won't bother for 1 hour of sleep but anything more is better than no sleep at all. But I too have a tendency to sleep though alarms by that point, often waking up many hours later.

After eschewing sleeping pills for most of my life, I finally resigned myself to needing them to stay sane and my doctor prescribed Ambien, and it has changed my life. I can now fall asleep almost all the time. It's not for everyone - it's fiendishly addictive, it makes you forget what you did the night before, it causes some people to do all sorts of things under its effects, and is impossible to quit (you will not fall asleep for the next two nights after discontinuance, unless you taper off dosage gradually. But all of that is better than the alternative.

usually if I have less than 2 hours I won't bother trying to sleep anymore. Of course, at that point I will usually take a sick day, because I would be pretty much useless at work anyway.

If I'm still awake by 3 or 4 am, I know I'm better off not bothering. I feel worse the next day if I've had 2 or 3 hours sleep than I do when I haven't had any at all.

This is something that used to happen to me (on average) 4 out of 7 nights per week, but one upside of chronic illness is that this only happens to me about once every couple of months now.

Never, unfortunately. This leads to inevitably drifting off around 8 or 9 am when I have to be at work by 11. Sleeping pills are essential for me also, but don't like taking them if I have to be up in less than 7hours - leads to zombification the next day.

My biggest regret is always that I could have doing something productive instead of lying there seeing the curtains gradually lighten.

3 hours is doable for me but 2 and under i give up

actually im p. sure time counting is the worst thing you can do. you really need to stay away from clocks so youre never quite sure how much sleep you are getting/got.

i gave up at around 4 am, got out of bed & turned on the lights. my closet is now SUPER ORGANIZED. Of course, I thought I should close my eyes for an hour or so at 6 am and so woke up at 10:30.

We get a week off for Xmas -- I'm going to use this opportunity to try an experiment. A coworker mentioned that someone she knew who went to a sleep therapist counseled her to sleep later and later every day, until her schedule righted itself. I only have to make it one more night and get to work at a reasonable hour tomorrow...

If I've only got a 2-hour window to sleep, I find it's no longer worth it - I'll just have a hell of a time getting up and probably forget to do important shit.

omg. i just found this and made a self-diagnosis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndrome

(hard at work, here)

It's always a bad sign if I'm up this late and start watching a terrible movie on cable.

That article on DSPS is interesting, but really, the condition could be used to describe dozens of potheads without regular jobs etc. Seems the big test for diagnosis would be monitoring the time of the body temperature drop. Definitely have woken a number of times in cold sweats in the middle of the nightfor no apparent reason, I wonder if that could be anything associated. Writing this at 6.20 in the morning after failing to sleep in the period 2.30 - 5am…

o hey it's 5:30am and i'm not tired. delayed sleep phase syndrome sounds plausible, though there is my pothead-esque lack of regular schedule. though i do find that if i fall asleep early enough (before midnight, say) my body fails to recognise that it's supposed to be more than a nap - i'll always find myself awake at 2 or 3 and unable to get back to sleep until the usual sunrise bedtime.

yeah, when reading the article half of me was like 'THIS IS ME' and half of me was like, I just need to get it together.

this sleep chronotherapy thing i'm doing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_phase_chronotherapy) is harder than I thought. I thought my body would naturally take to the idea of sleeping later & later every day, but it seems that this is not the case. We'll see...

yo, what's up?

worst part of insomnia, hitting refresh over and over on a 2 am ile

it's 1:30 in the afternoon here but i've been there, big fella