My sleep has gone strange

Started 30 August 2024 · 19 replies · 205 hearts · read 3.2k times

TavishIsle of Skye, UK · 30 August 2024

1.9 years ago

Starting a thread on this because it keeps coming up in ones and twos: My sleep has gone strange

Writing this partly to ask and partly because writing it down usually tells me what I think.

What I would find most useful is not advice. It is somebody describing what their version of this stage was, and how long it went on for before it changed.

My prescriber has been fine, genuinely. The problem is that I get nine minutes twice a year and there is no version of nine minutes that covers a whole stage of this.

What I keep tripping on is not knowing whether where I am is where I should be at this point, and having nobody to ask who is not either selling something or worried about me.

Not looking for a plan. Just company, and whatever anybody found at the same stage.

KateBelfast, NI

I would gently say that twelve weeks is not long. It felt endless from inside it and looks very short from here, and both of those readings are honest.

OllieCardiff, UK

Around week nine I stopped noticing it. Not because anything dramatic changed, but because it had become part of the week rather than an event in it.

7me too 4

StefanZurich, CH

Something that helped me through the middle stretch: I stopped judging a week by the last day of it. Fridays were always the worst read on how the week had actually gone.

EsiFacilitatorToronto, Canada

Thank you all for the care in here. When somebody arrives frightened, what this circle aims to hand back is experience rather than instruction, and that distinction is the whole reason it exists.

IlyaAlmaty, KZ

Building on what Esi wrote rather than answering the original question.

I kept a note each week with three lines: what changed, what I did about it, what I want to ask. Twelve weeks of that is a genuinely useful document to take to a review.

OndineLausanne, CH

The thing nobody tells you about the first twelve weeks is that you are learning a body that keeps moving. By the time I had a rule for something, the rule needed updating.

SindriReykjavík, IS

Weeks four to eight were the steepest part for me. Everything was changing slightly every week and I could not tell which changes were the medication and which were just November.

12me too 9

NellaUtrecht, NL

Nothing to add except that I am glad this thread exists.

Ozzy GWalsall, UK

Gently disagreeing with Nella, or rather adding the other half of it.

I asked here in week five whether I should be further along, and somebody replied asking further along than what. I did not have an answer, and that was the answer.

BlueStroud, UK

#10

The weekly rhythm of this circle carried me through the first twelve weeks more than any single piece of information did. Turning up on a Thursday to say a small thing was enough.

NualaArmagh, NI

#11

My review at twelve weeks was nine minutes long and the printout I brought did most of the talking. I would recommend the printout to anybody approaching theirs.

BramleyBath, UK

#12

I want to say plainly that my first twelve weeks contained one week I would describe as bad. One. The other eleven were somewhere between uneventful and quietly encouraging.

10me too 4

NikoTbilisi, GE

#13

Something I did not anticipate was how much I would want to talk about it and how little the people around me would want to hear about it. This circle absorbed the difference.

Obi OEnugu, NG

#14

Building on what Bramley wrote rather than answering the original question.

My most useful early habit was writing down the question the moment it occurred to me, because by the appointment I could never remember what had been worrying me at eleven at night.

TavishIsle of Skye, UK

#15

I have nothing to add and I did not want to leave it unanswered.

10me too 1

KateBelfast, NI

#16

Reading Niko, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

Do not compare your week seven to somebody else's week seven. I did that for about a month and it cost me a fortnight of unnecessary worry.

OllieCardiff, UK

#17

Picking up Tavish’s point rather than starting a new one.

The bit I underestimated was how much of the first twelve weeks is logistics — collections, dates, where things live, who knows. The physical side took up much less of my attention than the arrangements did.

EsiFacilitatorToronto, Canada

#18

Noticing out loud that we have drifted into comparing timelines. That happens without anybody intending it and it does not help the person who opened the thread. Let us come back to them.

MargueriteQuebec City, CA

#19

Twelve weeks in I finally understood that the steep part is the learning, not the medicine. Once I knew how my own week worked, everything got quieter.