How do you sleep?

[mimekiller]

I mean not like how do you sleep knowing what you've done but what's your physical sleep PROCESS.

For me it's lying on my left side, right arm stretched out, sometimes on a second pillow that doubles as pretending it's a person(my wife left me) until I feel a bit of drool and my mind is in a state of relaxation, than I flip over, going on my right side/almost fully on my belly, than I fall asleep.

[Phoebe]

I sleep with a hugger pillow too, even though there are plenty of critters around who might serve that purpose. Pillow won't elbow you suddenly or take the covers and leave you out alone in the cold! Pillow doesn't ever walk in poo or lick its own butt.

Anyway, what was the question? I sleep like a stone within ten seconds of hitting horizontal.

[Iantha]

On my right side, right arm stretched out under my pillow so that the fingers of my right hand hang off of the bed. Covers all the way up to my nose, scootched down to the end of the bed so that my feet stick out from under the covers and over the edge of the bed.

Once I'm asleep, then I'll toss and turn and move all over the bed. Left side, right side, face down, face up, covers on, covers off, on a diagonal, it's a wonder that Paul gets any sleep at all with me in the bed.

[Zen]

What is this "Sleep" of which you speak?

But, more seriously, I used to sleep on my left side, with my arm under the pillow, because I've had bursitis in my right shoulder since my last week of college (literally... It flared up at my final softball game for the rec league soft ball team I was playing with my senior year. I got there and just... couldn't throw. It didn't hurt all that much, per se... I just had no strength in my shoulder at all. We had the bare minimum to play the game, so instead of forfeiting, I played 2nd base instead of short stop, figuring that there would be fewer hits to that side of the infield and I could actually get the ball to the base from there, albeit with a lame arc on it. I also couldn't really swing the bat either. It was a "pitch to your own team" league and I was popping up at every at bat. Somewhere in the early innings, we had a shot at a double play and I got turned around fielding the throw from the third baseman, since I was used to playing short. My body was in entirely the wrong position as I tried to turn the double play and the guy coming from first, who was already out, decided to try to break up the play by coming in standing up with his arm in front of him, into my ribs. He had a prosthetic arm... So, now I had bruised ribs on my left side and a bum shoulder on my right... I was, to say the least, useless. But I digress...)

However, since I developed arthritis in my lumbar spine, I can no longer sleep on my side without a large amount of pain. Instead I sleep on my stomach. I do have a body pillow and have tried sleeping draped on it. It works somewhat, but I tend to roll off of it and that can lead to lying on my back, which is the absolute worst thing I can do because it leads to sleep apnea events AND pain in my back.

However, in the numerous sleep studies I had back when I had insurance that was worth the paper it was written on, I discovered several things about my so called "sleep".

1. I suffer from mild to moderate "sleep apnea", but only when I am lying on my back. The fact that I cannot lie on my back without extreme pain due to my arthritis, and cannot use the BiPAP machine because the mask will only stay in place when I AM lying on my back makes the apnea issue a non-issue as far as I'm concerned.

2. Even when apnea events are eliminated, I do not get enough "restful sleep". In the first sleep study done, with no CPAP, I was in REM sleep for less than 10% of the night and in Stages 3 and 4 combined (Delta Wave sleep) for less than 5 percent of the night. In the 2nd study, I with the CPAP eliminating the apnea, I was, once again, in REM less than 10% of the night and, this time, in Stage 3 less than 5 percent of the night with NO stage 4 at all. Later sleep studies followed the same pattern. Even without the apnea as a "sleep disturbance", I do not get into the deep, restorative stages of sleep or into REM sleep as much as I am supposed to. The majority of my time was spent in Stage 1 sleep, which is the lightest sleep that you go into right when you first fall asleep. The averages for normal sleep stages are about 5% in Stage 1, about 50% in Stage 2, about 20% in Delta Wave sleep or Stages 3 and 4, and about 25% in REM.

So, yeah... I pretty much just don't sleep...

[Phoebe]

That sounds terrible. I've experienced enough sleep loss to know I couldn't function like that. They do have dental devices for people with sleep apnea but they don't work for everyone - worth checking out though? Some illnesses also cause you not to sleep and it's a terrible, terrible thing - then you don't know whether your symptoms are caused by the illness or the sleep loss.

[Tahlvin]

We have a white noise machine. I had been trained to sleep lightly for years, to wake up when the kids cried in the middle of the night, and began using the white noise machine after they were all old enough that we didn't have to worry about that sort of thing. It helps drown out most of the noises that would otherwise result in me waking up every 30-60 minutes all night long.

We have a memory foam body pillow we use as a demarcation line between my side of the bed and my wife's. I generally sleep on my side; if it's my right side, I usually have my left leg resting on the body pillow.

And when I switch from one side to the other, I almost always wake up in order to roll over. That's partly from the kids again, from when they would sleep in bed with us and I wanted to make sure I didn't roll over onto one of them in the middle of the night. But it's also partly from early in our marriage, when we had a water bed and I tried to make sure I didn't wake up my wife each time I had to roll over. (In retrospect, I hate waterbeds.)

[Iantha]

[Zen]

[Tahlvin]

[mimekiller]

AMAZON PRIME has a pretty wide variety of white noise 8 hour long videos, rain, rainfalls, even busy city streets if that's your jam.

[Phoebe]

[Cazmonster]

Sleep after work is usually easy. Find space in one of the beds and use it.

Sleep when there is no work is a cruel joke. I get a couple three hours, then an hour or two of crappy wakefulness and then more sleep.

But School, glorious School has started. I will get to sleep like a human again.

[Tahlvin]

A few more things occurred to me as I was laying in bed last night...

My arms. Usually, the bottom arm is placed under the top pillow beneath my head. If I'm sleeping with >1 pillow (I usually have 2-3 at home), it has to be beneath the top pillow, not the bottom or middle pillow, or the arm ends up bent at an odd angle that's uncomfortable and doesn't allow me to sleep. Sometimes, the bottom arm goes across my chest so my hand is holding the opposite shoulder. The top arm sometimes goes with the bottom arm under the pillow, but usually just rests wherever it can. Very seldom, I seem to have no idea what to do with my arms to get comfortable, and I end up tossing and turning.

Also, related to waking up when I roll over, I also usually make sure I'm laying on my left side when it gets close to time for my alarm to go off. If I'm laying on my right side, that means my right ear is buried in a pillow and can't hear. With the surgery on my left ear, and the constant tinnitus, I have a hard time hearing my alarm with my left ear, so my wife ends up waking up and smacking me awake so I can turn the alarm off. If I'm laying on my left side, the tinnitus isn't as bad in my right ear, so I can hear the alarm and turn it off before it wakes up my wife. And yes, all of that means that I usually sleep lightly, and my circadian rhythms usually have me wake up before the alarm goes off anyways.