Posted by nocturnally yours on October 05, 2005 at 08:30:45:

In Reply to: Depression?? posted by not_drowsy on October 04, 2005 at 20:44:08:

I think it's an easy diagnosis when the doctor's are at a loss for an explination. In my case, I had very overwhelming problems which caused me not to sleep. Although this particular phase lasted a few months, my brain had registered the fact that I had the ability to stay awake, and the whole experience had been so devestating that my body would react every time I went to bed. In other words, it started to snowball. At the onset of sleep, I would feel a startled awakening. It was anxiety, and as stupid as it sounds, I found that I was so worried that I wouldn't sleep, that I stayed awake worrying about it for hours. I rarely do that anymore, but it's a hard road to recovery. It was never depression which kept me from sleeping, but anxiety. Anxiety is the whole culprit. Specialists will tell you that the two are closely related, and maybe they are, but the only time I really felt depression was during the times I had been deprived of sleep for a long time. I had never experienced depression like this before. It settled deep inside my stomach and chest (just like the anxiety) I had the same experience as you. I never felt sleepy because the anxiety kept me wide awake. The only way I could finally deal with it all was to concentrate on controlling the anxiety. The only way to control the anxiety was to give up on trying to sleep or worrying about it. It's not easy, but once you decide that sleep is something you'll eventually do, and that it doesn't matter whether you sleep 3 hours or 7 hours or not at all, you will be able to let go of the anxiety. Also, there are a whole bag of tricks to deal with anxiety when you you feel it coming on, but you first you need to get into a mindset where you don't "TRY" to sleep. You do need to explore why you just suddenly lost the ability to sleep. There are probably very good reasons which you may not see, right now, but even if you don't see it, your body will still sleep eventually.

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