possible sleep disorder or just fibro?
awade36 - Oct 22nd, 2009 5:21 PM
[ Original Post ]

I've had fibro since I was 16, and now I'm in my sophomore year of college, and in the past couple of months I've been getting really really sleepy in the middle of the day. If I fall asleep with no alarm, I sleep anywhere from an hour to two hours and wake up not sleepy anymore. If I set my alarm for 30 minutes it is unbelievably hard to not fall back asleep, and I get that icky rush of adrenaline feeling right when I wake up. Then when I go to sleep at night I have no trouble at all falling asleep and I usually stay asleep and wake up fairly refreshed.

I'm just wondering on if this is just a normal part of fibro, because it's a new symptom for me, or if this is something extra like a sleeping disorder. Anyone got an answer? :)

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axxie - Oct 23rd, 2009 4:52 PM

Hi awade36, yes indeed, what you are describing is part of FMS. FMS patients such as you or myself and everyone on this board have what they call low level of somatomedin C, it's a growth hormone that is stimulated in sleep. For some reason FMS patients have a problem with the structure of sleep. This only means, that healthy people have sequence of sleep stages. With FMS, there is no orderly pattern. We have a fragmented sleep pattern. If your sleep is fragmented and unorganized or out of sync this will contribute to our daytime symptoms, such as I want to do is sleep, because now my body is telling me I'm tired and want to sleep.

Stress and chronic pain equals insomnia, which just causes further stress, chronic pain which causes further sleep loss, and so on.

Doctors will usually just prescribe a sleeping pill, but the real answer is, finding out why you don't sleep, you would need to go to a sleep clinic, but that will not give you much, except if you have clear symptoms of physical sleep apnea.

Sleep clinics can't even tell if you happen to be a person who has delayed sleep phase sundrome or called DSPS, which can be mistanken for insomnia, the circadian rhythm is out of phase. You feel as if you aren't ready for sleep when the clock tells you that you should be. At times you may not get to sleep until early in the morning. When you sleep, you do sleep well and you wake refreshed, unless you have a coexisting sleep disorder. Most DSPS people like I, are night owls. We are sleepy during the day and have very bad mornings. On days off, I'll sleep until noon to clear up my sleep debt. Delayed sleep phase syndrome usually start in infancy. To what I know, I have always been this way.