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Sleep and fatigue

How I rearranged my week around the bad days

Started 2 March 2025 · 17 replies · 172 hearts · read 1.5k times

TorrinAberdeen, UK · 2 March 2025
1.4 years ago

Something I have been sitting with: How I rearranged my week around the bad days Not looking for advice so much as other people's experience.

Squeamish subject, so I am going to be plain about it and get it over with.

My pharmacist has been helpful and my question has now outgrown what she can answer at a counter, so I am asking here while I wait for an appointment.

I have written down when it happens and how long it lasts, because I could not answer either of those questions when my GP asked and I felt foolish.

I will come back and say what my appointment produced, because I hate reading threads that stop before the answer.

57

RufusGuildford, UK
#1

Something practical: I stopped scheduling anything on the evening of the day I do it. That one change took the pressure out of the whole week.

9me too 5

KikiFacilitatorGlasgow, UK
#2

Speaking as a facilitator: a symptom that is frightening you is a reason to ask, regardless of whether it turns out to be anything. Nobody qualified will think you have wasted their time.

23

KezWigan, UK
#3

The vivid dreams caught me completely off guard. Nobody had mentioned them and about a third of this circle seems to have had them.

7

SunnivaBodø, NO
#4

What worked was accepting that I had less in the day than I used to, temporarily, and taking things out of the week rather than trying to do them tired.

10

LeifTrondheim, NO
#5

Mine improved when I fixed something completely unrelated, which had been quietly wrecking my nights for a year. Worth casting a wide net.

8

PeggyRotherham, UK
#6

I was tired for about eight weeks and then I was not. I have no explanation. I offer it as data because the eight-week accounts are what I needed at week three.

10me too 8

BassCoventry, UK
#7

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

Light in the morning was the thing that helped most and cost nothing. Twenty minutes outside before nine, most days, and my nights changed within a fortnight.

7

NorahDerry, NI
#8

Quietly agreeing from the other side of the country.

9

HuwWrexham, UK
#9

Bass — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

I would say do not soldier on with this silently for months. I did five months and my GP's first response was to ask why I had not come sooner.

5

Ollie OPeterhead, UK
#10

Mine was worst in winter and much better in summer, and I now think a good half of it was seasonal and would have happened anyway.

7

NoahHull, UK
#11

I raised fatigue at a review and was taken seriously, tested, and reassured. I had expected to be told it was normal and left there.

8

MarenBremen, DE
#12

My sleep needed a completely different shape from the one it had before. Earlier, longer, and less negotiable, and it took me months to accept that.

12

TobySwindon, UK
#13

The four o'clock waking was the thing I could not solve. I have found nothing that fixes it and I have found it helps to know I am not the only one.

5me too 7

GildaTrieste, IT
#14

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

Coming back to say the fatigue lifted at about the four-month mark and has not come back. I wanted to leave that here for anybody currently in it.

10

SinéadCork, IE
#15

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

What I noticed was that the tiredness came in a wave in the mid-afternoon and if I could get through forty minutes it passed. Trying to push through it never worked.

14

KikiFacilitatorGlasgow, UK
#16

Speaking plainly as a facilitator: none of this is medical advice, none of us is qualified to give any, and that limit is what makes the rest of what we do honest.

16

BrunoMilan, IT
#17

Same here, and I am glad you said it first.

12