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Sleep and fatigue

Caffeine stopped working for me

Started 2 June 2024 · 18 replies · 235 hearts · read 2.2k times

AshSunderland, UK · 2 June 2024
2.1 years ago

A question rather than an update: Caffeine stopped working for me

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

This started at the same time as two other things, which is why I cannot attribute it to anything with any confidence.

I have read the guide on this and it covered the ordinary version. Mine is not quite the ordinary version and that is why I am asking.

Sorry to be graphic. If anybody has had this, I would rather hear it plainly than politely.

78

RillaAberdeen, UK
#1

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.

13

RufusGuildford, UK
#2

To the opening post rather than to the thread: Ash, this is my version of it.

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.

10

SamPortland, OR
#4

Somebody here said to treat energy as a budget rather than a personal quality, and that single reframing changed how I planned my weeks.

9

BassCoventry, UK
#5

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

LeifTrondheim, NO
#6

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.

14

NilsUppsala, SE
#7

What Leif described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

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

GigiNaples, IT
#8

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.

12me too 3

NorahDerry, NI
#9

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 6

OssianTromsø, NO
#10

My prescriber asked about my sleep before anything else when I raised fatigue, which I thought was a diversion and turned out to be the whole answer.

12

PeggyRotherham, UK
#11

My tiredness arrived without warning at about week five and lasted a month. It was not dramatic, it was just that everything took more out of me than it should have.

14

MarenBremen, DE
#12

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

What helped was scheduling the tiredness rather than fighting it. I moved the demanding parts of my week to mornings and stopped pretending afternoons were productive.

11

SinéadCork, IE
#13

That is a kinder way of putting it than I have managed about myself.

16me too 5

BrunoMilan, IT
#14

I had assumed the fatigue was psychological and it turned out to be worth a set of bloods. Something unrelated came up and it was fixable.

8

GildaTrieste, IT
#15

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.

13

HollisBath, UK
#16

Mine was much worse for the first three days after each step up and then fine. Once I saw that pattern in my notes I planned around it.

10

I am going to steer us away from comparing severity. It has crept in over the last few replies and it does not help anybody who is currently in it.

27

TobySwindon, UK
#18

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

The thing I would raise with somebody qualified is fatigue that is not improving over months rather than weeks. Mine was, so I did, and it was worth it.

9me too 1