Time to talk about sleep again.

Something like three weeks ago, I did the pill refill thing with my therapist. This time, we added a drug called trazadone to help me sleep. Quetiapine had not been doing the trick for me lately so I thought I would call in extra help, as it were.

Quetiapine has never had a really strong effect on me anyhow, except for when I was first taking it. Most of the time I have been taking it, it has been only the gentlest of nudges towards sleep. An elusive and evanescent state which, if I catch it when it happens, smooths my ride into slumber and helps me get all my busy, active thoughts to go the heck to bed already and let me sleep in peace.

But that’s only if I am lucky. My busy, active thoughts can shrug off the effects of Big Q quite easily, and so I have to be aware enough to get them pretty quited down before the drug kicks in and be in just the right frame of mind for it when it does.

And frankly, that is a tricky thing to me. The whole reason I need help getting to sleep is that I have this hyperactive mind that constantly has a hundred things on the go and that makes for a very loud and volatile mind space. While I am awake, this is not that much of a problem. I mean, it probably is a huge part of why I have trouble dealing with reality (I am too busy dealing with my inner unruly mob) but it only becomes a big problem when I am trying to get to sleep.

Then, it becomes like a parent trying to get their kids to calm down and go to bed. And I have so many goddamned kids. I’m like the little old lady who lived in a shoe over here. I spend all day seeking mental stimulation, and when it comes time to sleep, my mind is so stimulated in the opposite direction as sleep that it’s no wonder I have trouble getting to sleep.

It would be different if I could mentally exhaust myself. If I had a more normal, healthy mental setup, I would be able to stimulate myself until I was totally mentally worn out and then sleep would come naturally.

But that doesn’t work for me, at least, not consciously. I can stimulate myself all day and still have lots of mental energy left . It’s the one area of my mind in which stimulation leads to more energy and not less.

Part of that is that it is hard to find something that absorbs even a majority of my mental energy. Sure, video games are fun and absorbing, and chatting online is stimulating and sort of social, but it is a rare time indeed when those keep even a majority of my mental energies.

It’s just like during my school years, when I would look like I wasn’t paying attention to the teacher at all, but really I was hearing and absorbing it all, it just didn’t take up a lot of my mental energy, so I was also daydreaming.

(I’m not proud of that, by the way. How frigging rude of me. Would it have killed me to pretend to be paying attention? But when you are a kid, you don’t think of teachers as people. )

If I could find activities that truly absorbed all my mental energy the same way college exams used to, then I could probably exhaust myself. I suppose the closest thing I have come to there is writing a book. That usually soaks up most of my mental energy, to the point where I can’t even have music on because it takes away too much of my mental energy.

So maybe I should just write books all day. I don’t know.

Anyhow, back to trazadone. The idea was that I would not take the trazadone unless I felt like big Q wasn’t cutting it any more, and that didn’t happen until Thursday night.

I just could not get to sleep. I felt like my mind was frozen. I have been in that state before. It is not unpleasant in and of itself. I’m alert, I’m sharp, I’m coherent. It would be a great state to be in when I had a lot to get done.

But I never have a lot to get done.

And of course, it’s a nightmare for trying to actually get to sleep. I try and try but my mind just will not relax. It’s like trying to stuff an inflated hot air balloon into a briefcase. It is just plain never going to happen.

So I took a trazadone. And it worked quite well. The ice keeping me awake melted and I slid soundly into sleep. Got up in time for therapy, felt fairly well rested. I did feel very slightly sedated. It was like a slight warm tingling.

Last night, same story. Big Q was not cutting it at all. So I took my trazadone. And it helped me get to sleep.

And kept me there all freaking day today.

At least, I think it was the trazadone. I have sleepy days with or without chemical assistance, so it might just be that. One incident is one datum, and one datum does not a trend make.

So I will take it again tonight to see what happens. If it consistently makes me sleep really heavily, I can live with that. Might even be healthier for it.

But if it gets too hard to shake off when I want to in the morning, I might have to rethink it. My therapist says it is okay to try just half a pill, and I might do that if things get too hard to deal with.

It really irritates me to not be able to be awake when I want to be awake.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.