Life and Sleep

At first I wondered if I was going to sleep the rest of my life away. When I was first diagnosed I was sleeping all day long, then I would wake around 3-4pm and stay awake until about 8-9pm and then go back to sleep. It was difficult, especially for someone like me who used to be happy with anywhere from 3-5 hours of sleep a night, now I was getting 3-5 hours of awake time and sleeping all the rest. Of course it was all medication that was doing this to me, but this still didn't make me any happier! I was sleeping my life away and it felt like there was nothing I could do about it.

Time went by and I tried different medications and I swapped some good for some bad and so forth, meaning I was sleeping sometimes less and sometimes more and it all depended on the type of medication I was on and the dosage amount. For Example, on some meds all we had to do was increase the dosage by a small amount and all of a sudden I was sleeping an extra 4-5 hours, decrease another med at the same time and I was back to where I was in the first place? The thing about being Bi-Polar, well there are many things about being Bi-Polar, but one of them is, is that it is not an exact science, and there is no proven exact method to helping anyone because not only is everyone different, but so is everyone's treatment. I try to explain it this way to most people in hopes that they will understand, being Bi-Polar is like having diabetes, there are different levels of insulin that everyone has to take, well in being Bi-Polar there are different levels of chemicals your brain needs to functions, and this is what Bi-Polar really is, you body not producing enough of a certain type of chemicals and with out these chemicals you get the fun and wacky behavior that we all know and love as Bi-Polar.

So the long and short of it is when you are Bi-Polar you either get too much sleep or you don't get enough...you rarely ever get just the right amount. And the same goes for your treatment, you spend years taking all kinds of medications and hoping for the right mixture and maybe one day you get it? and if you do you hope and you pray that you will be able to keep the right levels, because once you go off, its like starting all over again. And the sleep is even worse because you spend all your time trying to not only find a medication that works, but you have to go thru the terrible sleep patterns all over again.