Comment by vrc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vrc | Hacker News Reader

I was in the ICU for an extended period of time, and as you can imagine, with the pain, discomfort, noise, and constant monitoring, I really "wasn't sleeping at all". I remember getting frantic and trying to discharge AMA, and the attending came to talk to me and listened to my principal complaint of not sleeping. He looked me dead in the eyes and said, "I'm a sleep doctor who's been watching sleep studies for 30+ years now, and I can assure you, outside of a very small number of patients with serious, often hereditary sleep issues, everyone sleeps. You may not feel like you slept, and can be convinced you were awake, but the body forces you to sleep throughout. And sometimes, when you think you fell asleep immediately, you actually didn't sleep for a while but you stopped forming memories as you were drifting off to sleep". It absolutely did nothing for me in that moment, but it's given me a lot of peace of mind since around sleep. You might still feel like crap, but you won't have anxiety on top of it!

> outside of a very small number of patients with serious, often hereditary sleep issues

He is likely referring to FFI. This is a genetic disorder. You cannot "catch" it. Your anxiety won't cause this.

If you are the kind of person who "can't sleep because you stress about not sleeping", then you can ignore this, your sleep issues are due to anxiety.

And the good news for people who have sleep issues due to anxiety: At some point, your body will win and force you to sleep.

I am coming around to that idea myself, and I too was given a similar come-to-Jesus lecture by a sleep specialist.

This is separate from the fact that ICUs are unforgivably noisy and chaotic. We will look at this part of medical history with horror. Yes, I do understand that making things appreciably better for patients in ICU is a massive and complex undertaking. I am not at all blaming the staff and docs.

I’ve long suspected marijuana has a similar effect, in that it “helps” you fall asleep by making it harder to remember the process of falling asleep. It’s widely known that marijuana inhibits short term memory formation. (I could be wildly off base)

Marijuana keeps me up unfortunately, since my brain becomes more stimulated and I just want to get up and do things. But I‘ve had massive ADHD my entire life so that’s not a neurotypical response I suppose. I wish I could just smoke weed and feel chill and calm or sleepy.

My ADHD meds (stimulants) also keep me up. Can be a real struggle sometimes.

A few years ago I used marijuana every night to go to sleep. It really, really screwed my sleep up. I started taking sleeping pills and got hooked on those. Very bad experience. Don't use any of that stuff, period. Even if the marijuana feels like it's working, it interferes with your REM sleep or something like that.

In the end my sleep issues were caused by anxiety disorder. Once I got on medication for that, I didn't have any further issues. Marijuana, sleeping pills, whatever, they're all just masking the symptoms of some other problem.

In my case cannabis masks pain and muscle spasms resulting from a spinal cord injury. Masking is the only option I have. And yet still I agree. Whilst I sleep, unlike without, it’s not the kind of sleep I knew. Then again, nothing is. It’s a drug of last resort (but then again they all are.)

I did a 24 hours blood pressure monitoring once. Every 30min it would go off. I was worried I'd never fall asleep and blood pressure would not show the normal rhythm, and it absolutely felt that way, but the reading definitely showed I was asleep at night.

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