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Why Am I Always Tired Yet Sleeping Lots ??

Back in early 2011 my chronic back pain became severe enough to impact my sleep and over a 6 month period I was getting a lot less sleep and beginning to develop depression and anxiety as a result of my increasing lack of sleep. I was averaging about 3hrs sleep per night and would normally be awake for hours in pain and discomfort and zopiclone was only a temporary fix for the lack of sleep at the time, otherwise nothing helped. This became less frequent later that year and eventually my back stopped keeping me awake at night altogether a few years ago but the issue I’ve been facing for years now is that during the day I’m always tired to varying levels. My body feels normal enough and so do my eyes and it does feel different to the normal type of tiredness one gets from having too many late nights, but often the issue is that I’ll feel an overwhelming urge to have a few or many knaps throughout the day which has proven very disruptive in all areas of my life and has slowly worsened over the last 7yrs it has been going on for. My interest in so many things has depreciated because I struggle to stay focused on them, I can’t really get up before 8am (and even that is really difficult), I’m very lazy and I yawn all the time. One annoying thing is that some of the time I find myself a lot less tired in the late evening (causing me to go to bed as late as 2:30am) but on other occasions I can’t stay awake past midnight and yet come 8 or 9am I’m still struggling to get up and it’s no easier during the day when I have these knaps because the urge is overwhelming and before I know it 10mins becomes an hour or more. My diet has improved a lot, I go to the gym 5-6 days per week and when it’s time for bed I fall asleep within about 10-15mins and may wake up once during the night. This problem does to a degree have a physical feeling in the form of a gentle tingly feeling in my head or simply an urge to close my eyes. Once upon a time I could relax on my bed and listen to music or do a whole load of other things, but now I end up closing my eyes and partially nodding off through them, there’s nowhere I can’t partially fall asleep and there has never been a day where I haven’t felt tired for some of the day. I’m lucky now in that I have a flexible job that allows me to start late (as I got sacked from a few in the first few years because I struggled with punctuality), I used to be a very attentive early bird but now I’m a lazy night owl who’s mostly late for things because I’ll have had a knap beforehand and lost track of time. So many things in my life have been put on hold because of this and its affected my personality massively. In the form of treatment I’m currently undergoing tests with the NHS sleep clinic and am at stage 2 whereby I had the second most sophisticated sleep monitor to monitor my sleep at night (the first showed no abnormalities). Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.
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Avatar universal
You're doing the right thing getting tested, as you want to either treat or eliminate the possibility of OSA, which can cause the symptoms you describe.

Presuming you have no underlying medical conditions causing this, then my take is this could be a circadian issue.  Meaning you no longer have two sharply defined rest-awakened periods, but they are overlapping.  

One solution would be to completely ditch the naps.  Avoid sleeping in.  Only allow the minimum time in bed you normally need for sleep.  Then give this schedule several weeks to see how you adjust.  

Will be interesting to see what your sleep doc says, keep us posted.
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3 Comments
I can only ditch the naps if I'm not feeling as tired, otherwise I'm just postponing the inevitable. I have been fairly good at not sleeping in, I have an 8am alarm to pre-warn me that I'll need to get up soon and an 8:30am one to get up to. Previously I was sleeping in an hour later. Circadian issue, never heard that word before.
Actually ditching the naps does not postpone the problem. The naps interfere with your C rhythm. You naturally will sleep a certain number of hours. If you go at the same time each night and up at the same time the C gets back the way it is supposed to be - as long as there isn't an underlying issue.

So ditch the pre-warn alarm and pop out of bed asap when you awaken. You will do much better if you read a book so you can understand it. though .
Pop out no matter how tired you feel, because you quickly adjust once vertical. My car pool driver used to yawn at every light - another person tilted her body and held her head up by propping her elbow on her desk - those people were in real pain and told me they didn't feel like going to bed until 2 in the morning because their body wasn't tired, but had to get up at 6.  So if they can get up that tired with little sleep, then you can get up because you will have more than 4 hours of sleep.
Avatar universal
The sleep clinic may be able to help some, but you need to read a book on sleep issues because any resolution will come from what you can do. You need to go to bed at the same time each night and get out of bed after 15 minutes if you wake up in the night until you are tired enough to go back to bed and sleep again. Measure how much sleep you get on average after a week, then figure what time you want to be up at so you can start the program. Go to sleep 15 minutes earlier than your average sleep time subtracted from your wake time.
So if you want up at 6AM and average 6 hours, go to sleep at 11:45 for the first week. Gradually increase the bed time by 15 minutes each week until you are sleeping the target hours you want. i.e. If you want 8 hours of sleep, go to bed at 11:45 the first week, 11:30 the next and so on. If you don't sleep enough in one night,do not linger in bed in the morning, just get up and you will surprisingly be able to work - and you will be more willing to go to sleep the next night because you will get tired at night. So it takes dedication to develop a sleep cycle, which you are not doing at all now because you are like I was - thinking your body was figuring the best time to go to sleep.
Don't listen to music, or tv or anything in your bed during the time allotted for sleep. If successful, you will develop a rhythm that works.
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