What to do with insomnia?

What do you do when you've tried all the recommended actions by the experts in sleep and you're still awake - and getting more irritable by the second - hours after going to bed?

There are all sorts of suggestions out there from drinking warm milk to getting up and doing something different for ten minutes. Both of those are out for me. Milk tends to make my IBS symptoms flare up, while getting up and moving around is out for obvious reasons.

Tonight I opted to stay in the riser chair again. My husband has a bad cold which, when mixed with asthma, does not make for an easy night's sleep for him. I figured it was my turn to look after him and the best thing I could give him was some peace for the night.

The chair is easily as comfortable as the bed, as it is piled in pillows and blankets. Sleep, however, is choosing to evade me. I'd chase the bugger down and kick it's arse if that was possible. It isn't, so I've made do with reading, catching up with online gossip, listening to music with the hope of falling asleep. I also tried listening to an audiobook with the hopes of falling asleep. It's almost 7am and I am still awake. Tired, a wee bit irritable, but still awake.

I've read dozens of blog posts and advice columns telling me to lie in a certain direction and relax before bed-time. Been there, done that and it still isn't helping! Right now I would give a less favoured body part to be able to sleep, so if anyone out in planet blog has any unusual suggestions that I may not have tried before, please contact me.

Mental Olympics

I have always struggled to maintain concentration on one subject. At school I could be sitting in a classroom and a passing cloud would completely capture me; I would have no clue what happened in the rest of the lesson because I had gone away into my own head, my own imagination. As an adult, I am forced to admit that nothing has changed. 

I cannot do one thing at a time. I quite literally cannot. My mind is in too many places, jumping over all the possibilities, all the entertaining things that there are; things that I could be doing. I have never, ever been able to read 'just' one book at a time. I have several on the go at any one moment and will jump in and out of them at random, switching from story to story. In between I will draw, or watch TV or talk or...the list is endless. 

I genuinely cannot say whether having fibromyalgia has changed this. If I try and think about it, try and focus for a minute, I think that nothing has changed that much. I still fit and have to be doing several different things at the same time. The only thing that really throws me is noise. I have never had much tolerance for noise - neither have my brother, or my mom - but now it is as though all noise blends into one. If there is background noise and you ask me a question, please do not expect an answer. All I will have heard is a random noise that will not have made much sense to me. A little like Charlie Brown's teacher where all you hear is "Wah, wah, wah, wah". 

Mind you, saying that I'm sitting here typing one thing while having a conversation with Pete about people murdering apple trees (cutting them down), so maybe it is not quite as bad as I sometimes think.