Calmness, Relaxation and Sleep

Lots of great hikes and joyful times this fall and winter, but lately I find myself busy with activist projects and building an online audience for those! If you'd like to know more you can find me on Twitter at @vegsister and find my nonprofit work at @PEERorg. 

But I do still have a few interesting thoughts on dog-related topics, and a lot of cool pictures :) So I'm going to shift the focus here and just start posting shit that feels right, and not worry too much about format. 

Here's a post I didn't get to finish up back in October. We all have our ways of processing stress. I walk the dogs, write, and then lie awake all night, while Florian runs his mouth like a fire hydrant, curses like a longshoreman, and smokes like a chimney all day only to pass into an impenetrable coma and sleep like a log all night. 

Fortunately, there is help for both conditions. You my remember that I've found help for lifelong insomnia from herbs and supplements. Turns out that some of the same compounds help Florian too! 

When he really gets going on one of his stressed out tirades, I've discovered that Kava Kava tincture dials him right down. 

Ranting Florian becomes peaceful, spaced out, slightly smiling Florian, and we can go on a nice hike and enjoy the scenery.










On a gorgeous day in October, we brought the dogs to Catoctin Mountain Park with its historic Iron Furnace

and literally wandered around, 

smiling and laughing, 

the morning's anxious rant about something absolutely inconsequential but at the time all-consuming, 











completely forgotten. 

Not sure if it was the Kava Kava, which is in tincture form so acts immediately, or the Cortisol Manager, which is more long-acting,

but taken together the results were outstanding.

I'll note here that I do think Cortisol management is key to those of us who experience anxiety and insomnia. If you've ever been told that your insomnia is "all in your mind" and that you can control it if you just make an effort, you know what it is to want to put a health care practitioner or well-meaning friend into a deep, immediate sleep with a swift punch to the temple.




Our sleep systems are a finely-tuned machinery of tissue, chemistry, and mental states. Of course there is a physical component to chronic insomnia. I'm pretty sure that my brain chemicals are out of whack and I produce too much cortisol, hence, I sleep only when I address that.

But lately, most of the time, life seems to be addressing that for me most days! For the most part I've been sleeping with no chemical assistance the past couple of months. 

I don't know why, as there's no huge difference in my habits, thoughts, or mental states between this good-sleep time and other times. I do think that relaxation and sleep feed on themselves, and a good sleep groove tends to self-perpetuate. 

That was a lot of words! Time for a bit of silence. Peace to you all. 

Toward a Back Pain Solution: Core workouts with Dahlia

My sleep breakthrough has persisted a few weeks now, and I am sleeping unassisted by anything except a pretty boring book and my snoring little pit bull by my head. 

On a related note, though my insomnia much predates my lower back pain, the latter has been a persistent problem since I moved to this area 7 years ago and made a series of really bad mattress decisions. Fortunately, this back pain improves with activity and does not affect dog walking or hiking--but I have long wished I knew someone who could tell me what was wrong with my back and what mattress would fix it. The mattress salesmen who hover over you and make suggestive remarks while you're trying to decide, then tell you that miraculously the very mattress you're testing has been reduced to 50% off TODAY ONLY BLOWOUT SALE ACT NOW, somehow I don't think have my best interests at heart. 

Well I finally stumbled upon the website mattressunderground.com. What an exhaustive, unbiased resource for exasperated mattress shoppers! Empowered to make an informed mattress decision, with no sleazy salesmen  leering over my shoulder, I finally decided on a firm latex mattress from Flexus Mattress Company, which was far below retail price. When I sleep with pillows under my chest and knees--and with Dahlia by my head--I am finding that I not only do so with no pharmaceuticals but with a minimum of back pain.

Though a good mattress is key, I am well aware that it is not the only factor in reducing back pain. 

As Dahlia knows, having a strong core is also a huge factor. 










An exercise ball is a great way to work the abdominal and lower back muscles because it increases your back's range of motion, and the bouncy surface reduces the chance of injury.  You can find some great core strengthening exercises here and here .

And I find that having a fitness buddy can really add focus and motivation to my workouts. Not to mention an additional level of challenge!

A 20-minute core workout, coupled with some puppy bonding time and followed by an ice pack to accelerate lower back healing, could I think become a new evening routine!

I think Dahlia's on board. 
















 
How do YOU enhance your workouts?

My little sleep angel

Those of you who have been hanging with us for a while know that I struggle with sleep, and that I am always on the lookout for new ways to crack the code of my insomnia. 

I recently had a few days coming up where I knew I didn't have much going on that required mental acuity, so I decided to make another go at kicking the prescription pharmaceutical habit. 










With the result that I had two sleepless nights, but once that was out of my system I started sleeping like a...well, like a normal sleeper. With no Ambien, no Benadryl, no herbs.

Just dogs. I do think that small, snorty, compact female dogs have a uniquely soporific effect on me. If they are in bed with me, snoring, so much the better. 


It is incredibly liberating to be sleeping without assistance! Lately, I've been writing--the old fashioned way, with pen and paper--before bed instead of taking pills. 

Getting those little nagging thoughts, or larger philosophical questions, or haunting memories, out on paper, somehow calms the system.  

It's something I used to do a lot of, then got out of the habit.







How do YOU calm the mind and spirit? Does a little bundle of fur do it for you, or do you need something stronger? 

Morning Wake Up Call

Snnnfdfdfdfdfdfdfffffdfdshssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss
Brrrrrahhtdtdtdtdtdtdtshsssshfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
Krrrrrdtdtdtdtdtdtbrahtsffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

Sweetie, what are you doing starting the lawn mower at this hour in the morn--

Whoops, sorry, that wasn't you.

Daria, can I offer you a CPAP machine?

Sleep developments

It's been so long since I posted. 

These are poorly formed late-night thoughts that I put down because writing relaxes me and will maybe allow me to sleep. 

I don't have pictures in this first part because my hard drive is damaged....in the middle of trying to start my taxes, the TAXACT screen froze on me and I smacked my computer. I know, brilliant. All those pictures, all those memories....at least I have this blog for the best ones since 2010. 

The below, I wrote months ago. I had found an herbal method that worked, had tapered down the dosage from where I started with 4 pills of each to one of each, and was sleeping well. (See below) Then I got sick, and the anxiety made me need my ambien again. And a doctor at the practice I go to said those herbs are dangerous if taken long-term, and Ambien is not meant to be taken long term, and I was so angry that someone who so clearly knows so little about insomnia was condescending to me about it, I wanted to tell her that I've been taking Ambien for 10 years and have been able to taper off the dosage, rather than increase it, over time. A lifetime of experience trumps an hour of instruction in med school, lady.

So my frustration is keeping me up at night too. But I will write this ill-informed doctor, I will go to the sleep specialist she recommended, and I will pursue this until I find out what is going on and how to fix it!

Like many of my fellow bloggers, I suspect, I have always struggled with sleep and getting an amount that makes for well-rested, energy-infused days. Lots of times I fight nodding off at my desk in the afternoons, occasionally I feel foggy in the brain when trying to comprehend things people tell me, and sometimes I feel overwhelmed at the thought of doing things that ought to bring me pleasure, like tidying up the garden and the house, cooking, and organizing. 

I get bursts of energy despite the sleep deprivation, and I fight the fatigue with a determination to be creative and active and productive because I know that to try to nap would be futile, tempting as it may be. 









So I am always trying new things to try to kick the prescription pharmaceutical habit, which allowed me to sleep far more than I would have otherwise over the ten years I was a habitual user but which filled me with doubt as to whether it could really be a healthy long-term way to go.

I am happy to report that it seems I have found a non-pharmaceutical solution. A combination of three herbs, Seriphos,
Cortisol Management, and Gaia Sleep Formula, taken together about two hours before I want to fall asleep,  seem to produce the necessary sleepiness and ability to shut down. 







I can't say how happy it makes me to be sleeping without the help of Sanofi Aventis or GlaxoSmithKline. The herbal habit is more expensive than the prescription meds, and because of the way our wacky health care system in the US works, insurance won't pay for them, and yes it has crossed my mind that insomnia may be very amenable to the placebo effect. 

But I'm sleeping! Most nights.

The other thing recommended is the sleep restriction thing, where you're supposed to spend less time in bed doing things other than sleeping. The theory being that if you read in bed, talk in bed, argue in bed, make out with the dogs in bed, and listen to your boyfriend check out new ideas for ballet class on Youtube in bed, then you're associating bed with all those active things and your body is not getting the message to sleep when you're there.

The strict version demands no reading in bed, no lounging in bed, no spooning with the dogs in bed unless you intend to actually sleep entwined with a mastiff, which you would if you were Florian but might not if you were most other people. 

I think insomniacs in general already have a little problem with being too hard on ourselves, and reading in bed is one of my great pleasures. So I am not adhering to the most draconian of the sleep restriction directives, but doing sensible things like getting out of bed and doing something else after a few hours of wakefulness. 

So here I am on the living room couch writing this blog post at 2:26 am. And it's true, I am starting to feel a sensation of relaxation take me over, a sensation that would not have found me if I were still lying in bed fretting. 

As all bloggers know, writing has a way of doing that.

Alright then, I'm going to spend a few minutes on a relaxation video and then off to bed! I wish you all a peaceful slumber.

Wordless snoozes

Environmental impediments to sleep

When I tell people about my struggles with sleep, sometimes they ask me whether there's something in my environment that might be adding to the trouble. 


I've heard that it's not good to have too many plants in the bedroom, because they have a lot of life energy and that can disturb the mind's ability to shut down.

Somehow, if life energy in the bedroom is to blame, I don't think I'm going to point the finger at my houseplants.


The bed is one of Sandy and Fozzie's favorite wrestle zones, and Lamar's absolute favorite place to growl at both of them.


Aside from all that, Florian sleeps like a combination between a tornado and a burrito. By an hour or two into the night, the covers are all either wrapped tightly around him or strewn on the floor. 


While he lies diagonally across the middle of the bed. 


And Fozzie is lodged in a circle between our heads, and Sandy is stretched out against my legs. Making my prospects of negotiating a more or less comfortable position with some blanket coverage just about hopeless.

I suppose if I really thought the heaps of dogs and diagonal tornado boyfriend were affecting my sleep, I'd do something about them. 

I'd put them all on Petfinder (I hear Swiss ballet dancers get adopted really fast) and just go run off with my budgies. 


Fortunately, my problem goes way deeper and the life energy in my bed doesn't seem to affect it one way or the other. As long as I have access to my full array of Non-Canine Sleep Aids, I think all of my little packets of excess life energy are going to stay. 

Non-Canine Sleep Aids (NCSAs)

When I wrote my first post on sleep, I was initially surprised to find out how many of you also suffer from insomnia. It is such an isolating affliction, it always surprises me to hear from others who go through the same thing.

But of course, many people go through it. Insomnia is the most common sleep affliction and affects 35% of the adult population in any given year. 


I've had it for as long as I can remember, so I've had some time to think about and try lots of different treatments. 


In graduate school, I even did a cross-cultural comparison of sleep remedies in Traditional Chinese Medicine and in the herbal medicine practiced by the Dominican curanderos who practiced out of the botanicas near where I lived in New York City while I was at Columbia. 


Maybe some of these ideas will be helpful to you. 
1. Valerian. Made into a strong tea--you have to simmer the root for 5 minutes or so--it smells absolutely horrific but does induce drowsiness. A couple of times, its been enough to make me sleep. You can make it taste and smell more bearable by mixing with mint, catnip, chamomile, alfalfa, or other calming herbs. 
2. St. John's Wort. You can buy the tincture or buy the bulk herb and make tea, or make your own tincture. Never has been enough to conquer my insomnia demons but does replace mild anxiety with a nice feeling of well-being.
3. Xiao Yao Wan (Free and Easy Wanderer). Chinese herbal patent formula that corrects liver imbalance. I tried this years ago, in powder form mixed with hot water. It did induce a pleasant drowsiness that led to sleep.
4. Diphenhydramine hydrochloride (Benadryl, Tylenol PM). I discovered this when I was in Guatemala and taking Dramamine for the crazy bus rides; the related compound in Dramamine made me very sleepy. Sometimes, one of these is enough by itself. 

There are many other remedies that others have apparently used to good effect, that haven't done much for me. These include Melatonin and many herbs such as chamomile, spearmint, catnip, passionflower, hops, and kava kava. 

Then there are the allopathic remedies that most doctors don't like to prescribe because they are reputed to make things worse if you ever go off them and to require higher and higher doses to be effective. I have not found this to be the case. I've been taking one prescription pharmaceutical or the other for sleep since about 2003, and have not--as many doctors have warned me I would--had to increase my dose or found that the medication no longer worked over time. 


I have realized, especially after reading the excellent book Insomniac by Gayle Greene, that most doctors don't know a darn thing about insomnia. A common allopathic pattern seems to be to refuse the few medications that actually are specific to insomnia, and instead to try to get patients on an antidepressant. This is because most doctors do not consider insomnia to be a primary ailment, but secondary to some other psychological or medical complaint.


After doing battle with countless practitioners who tried to convince me that I was depressed or had an anxiety disorder, I am happy to finally have gone to a sleep specialist who understood that I'm fine in every respect except that I just can't sleep. Even this doctor didn't talk to me much about the underlying causes of insomnia, which Greene discusses in Insomniac--the possible overproduction of cortisol, the hormonal imbalances--but, with a seeming sense of resignation that echoed my own, he did prescribe some things that have been helpful.
1. Alprazolam (Xanax). An antianxiety drug that I got over the counter when I went to Mexico in 2003 and used for most of that year and the next. A low dose made my mind just shut down, in a good way.
2. Zolpidem tartrate (Ambien). I was first prescribed Ambien in 2002, have been taking it in small doses fairly regularly since 2005 when I started graduate school. I take a lower dose than I started with and have only increased it during stressful times. Just lets things shut down. 
3. Ambien CR. This is for when Ambien gets you to sleep, but doesn't keep you asleep. Didn't make a huge difference for me.
4. Gabapentin. Tashi took this for her arthritis so I was surprised when the sleep specialist prescribed it for me. It's also used to control seizures in epileptics. Sometimes it gets me to sleep by itself, other times I have to take a bit of Ambien too. When it works, I wake up so rested and pain-free I think at first that I slept on a different mattress. When I slept without any prescription for a few weeks recently, it was after taking Gabapentin and no Ambien for a night. I felt so relaxed the next evening that I decided to try sleeping without a pill, and succeeded, and kept on succeeding until I got a cold and lost that sleep mojo.


It feels strange to divulge the full extent of my sleep problem, and especially to discuss at length the prescription meds I take to manage it. I sound like a wacko and a druggie.


But the stigma and the misconceptions about insomnia are the reason I'm writing this. The perception that it isn't a real ailment, is only secondary to some sort of other disorder and that if I would only stop drinking coffee (which I don't drink) or alcohol (which I drink only occasionally) or get more exercise (I ride my bicycle about 40 miles a week and walk the dogs easily 10 miles a week) or treated my anxiety and depression (I'm generally pretty happy and only a little anxious) or ate meat (don't even start), I'd sleep.  

So I'm writing this for any of you bloggers who look at your blissfully snoring canines with envy, and feel like a bit of a freak that you can't just join them wherever they go when they snooze off. If you had diabetes or high cholesterol or any number of other chronic conditions, you'd take your meds in order to function and not beat yourself up about it. I do believe that insomnia is a primary physical ailment resulting from some sort of chemical thing going on in the brain and nervous system--too much of something that makes us alert or too little of something that makes us able to shut down--and that some of us need outside help in getting those things to balance.

I'd certainly prefer not to patronize the drug companies that profit from my imbalance, and to find a way to sleep that is more in keeping with my "natural" groovy crunchy way of life. But sleeping sure does make life easier, and for those nights when a tiny snoring foster piglet is not enough, I'm glad there are other options.

New Year and More Sleep

This year is off to a good start!

For reasons that I don't fully comprehend, I am back to sleeping with no prescription pharmas after a few weeks of having lost my sleep mojo.

After that blast of really good sleep that lasted a while, I had a bit of a cold and was not surprised that this constituted a setback to my new sleep paradigm. Though it would be perfectly rational to sleep deeply when sick, my sleep system is anything but rational and being sick always brings with it a tinge of anxiety and hyper-awareness that make it even more difficult to doze off. 

Not even my velvety compact little/big red sleeping pill could conquer this hyperawareness, no matter how I rolled her up right near my head or stretched her out along my legs.

So, it was back to the wonders of modern medicine and the little white pills for a while.

The good news is that I seem to have gotten that elusive sleep capacity back again.

Like an ephemeral spirit who sometimes materializes to sprinkle me with her magical dust, and sometimes flits out the back door into the forest, not to be heard from for weeks again, the sleep fairy has decided to take up residence in my bedroom ever since right around the New Year.

Maybe thanks to having such a fun, joyful holiday and New Year with my wacky human and canine family, I seem to have returned to a level of well-being that allows me to drop off with all the other snoozers in my bed.

With a little help from my nonprescription, furry, velvety, snoring, firmly muscled sleep aids, maybe this really is a longer-term sleep breakthrough! It remains to be seen.

Wonder if my HMO will cover dog treats?

Sleep

I have struggled for my entire life with insomnia, and much of the time have required some sort of prescription medication just to get me to sleep.

It's an odd malady, not being able to do this most basic of things that seems to come naturally to everyone else. Certainly, it has always come naturally to everyone I've ever slept in the same room with.

From Mom, to every college roommate and commune-mate, to every boyfriend up to and including the current one. Every dog, from the hyper pittie puppies to the anxious shepherds and the stiff older dogs and everyone in between--all have slept like the proverbial log. 

Over the years, I've heard every variation of deep breathing, nighttime grunting and mumbling, and snoring--sometimes for hours on end-- as I've struggled to get to sleep. 

There have been periods off and on when I've done better--years ago, when I camped and slept outside in Arizona and Utah during a six-week backpacking program on the Colorado Plateau, and more recently when I traveled in Guatemala and slept using only an occasional Benadryl. 

And for the past few days, as we've settled into a rhythm with Sandy and gotten used to having a tiny female pit bull packet snuggled in between us. 


It's not that I don't love my other, larger packets of sleeping joy, or that they don't bring me comfort.


It's just that there's something about this particular package of warm breath and snores that allows my mind to be at peace.






Maybe it's that she's so tiny, and sweet, and vulnerable.


Maybe it's the well-being that comes from knowing that we very probably saved her life, and feeling how worthwhile that is.











And maybe its the comforting sensation of again having a compact muscular little red girl dog around. A red girl dog who reminds me with her spunk and her spirit of Tashi, whose ears and breath and snores I have never stopped missing since she passed away in April. 


Tashi is now in the midst of a long sleep, or maybe she's already entered a new life as a grumpy little grizzly or a spunky salmon swimming upstream or a Buddha incarnate whose growls bring instant enlightenment. 


Or maybe just a little bit of her spirit is making its way to us through our little foster dog, bringing her mom comfort and sleep at long last.