anti-social

I’m trying to come up with a good topic to write about today, but I can’t currently come up with anything. I’m plagued by a terrible headache that won’t go away and unfortunatley just feel like going to bed.

With any luck though, I’ll go home, journal, work on my Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Workbook, read, and go to bed.

Tomorrow is my last day in IOP, maybe that’s part of the reason I’m feeling crumby today.

a brief post on sleep and the depressed…

The sleeping habits of the depressed can be a many splendid thing.  And by splendid, I mean horribly confusing, at least in my experience with depression.

In the beginning, I could sleep all day and night, no problem. When I started Zoloft, in the very beginning of my recovery, I was weak from not eating and also wanted to sleep all the time.  When I switched to Effexor and started eating again I couldn’t stop thinking about things. And by not being able to control my thoughts, I couldn’t sleep either.

The struggle to find a psychiatrist was a completely different story, but after I finally found one that could fit me in, he prescribed Ambien.  I took an entire pill the first night that I also started a higher dosage of Effexor and a mood stabilizer, lets just say the result wasn’t a pretty picture the next day.  The rest of the week I used Ambien to sleep, but only took a half of a pill.  Even then, I couldn’t sleep the entire night. For some reason, my body wanted to wake up at 3 a.m. I’ve found through extensive reading on the subject that this is not uncommon for depressives.

Now that I feel like I have hit a mostly stable point in my medicine merry-go-round, I’m still having issues staying asleep at night.  For some reason my body still wants to wake up at 3 a.m. I typically get up, take a little walk around the place and lay back down and fall asleep shortly after.  Right now, I suppose I should just be thankful to get the sleep.

On a side note, I’ve also discovered that it is greatly amusing to watch people and make up a story about their life.  I think I’m really going to enjoy the new writing kick that I’m on.