Let's talk about insomnia and strange sleeping patterns

I am deciding to write this because it is 6am right now and I already had breakfast, took Nadi for a walk, and am working on my 2nd coffee. This wouldn't be such a strange thing to a normal person but I didn't go to bed last night until 330AM. For whatever reason, I woke up at 530 or so anyway. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me and I will admit, the one of the main reasons that I decided to get up instead of just going back to sleep was because a friend of mine and I had been talking about McMuffins the night before and I guess that was on my mind. Once I hit the "place order" button on my phone I was forced to stay awake.

Ok, I wasn't forced, I wanted to and probably wouldn't have been able to get back to sleep anyway.

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I was reading recently that a lot of people think they suffer from insomnia but it is really something called "sleep procrastination" which sounds like a made up thing so that psychiatrists can get us hooked on medication but well, some of it makes sense.

I do this frequently

Despite being tired, I will continue to do other things such as watch TV or read a book or play a video game rather than turn out the lights. Then when I do turn out the lights my mind is still engaged in whatever it was that I was doing before and therefore I am too mindfully active to achieve slumber. This has been an issue for me since I was a late teen. In high school and early college years I used to purchase Nyquil not because I was sick but because the combination of whatever the hell is in there would KO me eventually.

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I've been taking some sort of sleep aid almost all the time ever since. I know this isn't a good way to live but the alternative is for me to just lie awake in bed every single night and this to me is one of the worst things that can happen. You struggle to sleep and now that you are thinking about it, you struggle even more. Eventually you give up and get up to do something that is meant to make you tired but it doesn't work and then the next day you end up more exhausted because of it.

I have tried to set a regular sleep pattern. I have stopped watching TV in my bedroom, I have left my phone in the other room to eliminate distractions, I have done all sorts of things including exercising like crazy in the evenings in an effort to make myself need to go to sleep but none of this works. I just can't go to sleep. Well, unless I am blackout drunk but that has a bunch of other side effects that I would prefer to avoid as well.

For the most part when I do go to sleep I can end up sleeping for 10 or more hours or at least that is what I think it is but it is most likely because I spend the first 2-3 hours rolling around and not really sleeping. Then there are other, strange days like the one I had last night where I go to sleep all sorts of late and then wake up at the butt crack of dawn for no particularly good reason. Now I am at my keyboard and even though I am down 2 coffees I feel like if i was to go and lay down in bed that I might be able to get to sleep again. I may try it but I don't think it is a good idea.

I am stuck in this pattern right now where I CAN get to sleep if I take an Ambien, Tramadol, Valium, or Xanax (or maybe a combination of more than one of those) but I really don't want to be dependent on pills to do something that is meant to come naturally to us.

It's all very frustrating and I have been like this for many, many years. I don't know what to do at this point but in a minute here I am going to attempt to go and lie down again and see what happens. I will set an alarm though because I do NOT want to end up staying in bed past noon or something crazy like that and then keep the cycle going.

Wish me luck!