Getting Some Zzzzz’s: Sleeping with Bipolar Disorder

By Joe Kraynak
July 7, 2009

As many people have discovered, regulating sleep is often one of the best ways to regulate mood. Unfortunately, maintaining a regular sleep schedule is not always as easy as it sounds, especially if your neighbors, your family or roommates, your schedule, your lifestyle, or your sleeping arrangements do not cooperate.

In Bipolar Disorder for Dummies, we offer several recommendations for getting to sleep and getting enough sleep, but not too much. We recommend setting (and sticking to) a sleep routine, winding down with pre-bedtime rituals, laying off the caffeine, getting your family (or roommates) to cooperate, teaming up with your doctor, and so on.

My wife and I have a great bedroom that’s terrible for sleeping. If it had any more windows or skylights, it would officially qualify as a greenhouse. Even worse, it has no door. The only thing setting it off from the rest of the house is a flight of stairs. My wife usually runs a fan to create some white noise so she can sleep; otherwise, if someone happens to be watching late-night TV in the living room, she can forget about sleeping. (On the other hand, I can sleep through just about anything.)

If sleep is an issue in helping you maintain mood stability, please share your experiences, insights, and suggestions. What challenges do you face in getting to sleep, staying asleep, or waking up in the morning? How have you addressed these challenges? What suggestions, if any, do you have to offer other visitors to the Bipolar Beat? (Working a split shift can really make you toss and turn. If you work a split shift, has it posed a problem? What have you tried to do to deal with it?)

In 1999, my wife, Cecie, experienced her first major manic episode. She ended up in St. Vincent’s Stress Center, where she was diagnosed as having bipolar disorder. She has been hospitalized a total of three times – all for mania. She rarely experiences the debilitating depression that many people with bipolar disorder struggle with. We have two children together, both of whom are pretty much adults at this point. Over the past decade or so, we’ve struggled to coexist with this disease. At times, it seems to be a cruel puppet master pulling our strings to act out some demented drama on the stage we call our home. Most times, we manage to keep this beast chained up, through a combination of medicine and therapy, but occasionally it escapes and turns our home inside out. In 2005, I had the good fortune to co-author Bipolar Disorder For Dummies with Dr. Candida Fink. In the process, I learned a great deal about bipolar disorder and strategies for treating it, preventing major mood episodes, and dealing with the fallout when preventive measures are ineffective. Through this blog, I hope to share what I’ve learned about bipolar while I continue to discover even more.

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4 Comments to
“Getting Some Zzzzz’s: Sleeping with Bipolar Disorder”

Bair at 11:23 am on July 8th, 2009

Candida Fink. Really.

afreuda at 9:31 am on July 9th, 2009

I do have a sleeping ritual, that helps me get in the mood for sleaping: I start with writing my journal for the day, in prder to clear up my thoughts. In the meantime, I prepare myself a ‘quiet night’ tea. After the tea is ready to be consumed (the right concentration and the right temperature) I take my cigarettes and my tea on the balcony and I smoke quietly, having small zips of tea. I watch the night trafic and reflect upon my plans for the next day, next month, next year, next therapy session, and so on for about 20 minutes and after that I go to bed. In bed I smoke another cigarette, laying down, and drinking the rest of my tea. After that I fall asleep undisturbed, wake up in the middle of the night for about 3-4 times, when I smoke again, in order to be able to fall asleep again. At about 8 thirty my alarm clock starts ringing, so I wake up for good, without any problem.
I could not separete myself from my good-night ritual, especially not the cigarette that I smoke right before falling asleep. And it’s a good thing that I leave alone, because if I went to sleep with someone else this coud arise as a ‘feature’, and… I am sure that it would not be very easily negociable.

thinker22 at 7:28 pm on July 9th, 2009

I try to take my PM meds at the same time each night, not have any caffeine after noon (but I often fail at that one because I substitute tea or soda or something caffeinated for alcohol which is another no no). Try not to drink either after 8pm. Turn of the computer usually by 9. Watch TV, make a protein shake, eat dessert, feed the animals, read a book, and then it’s 11:30 or so and I’m out usually before midnight. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, but I can fall back to sleep if I get a cough drop or relieve whatever woke me up. Then I wake up sometime between 7:30 and 9 almost every morning. Seroquel has helped me regulate my sleep over the past 3 months. Before then it was hit or miss. Insomnia is really bad for an already depressed and agitated state. Now…mood swings, that’s a whole other animal yet to be tamed.

David Ross at 6:48 am on August 3rd, 2009

I’ve come to the conclusion that sleep is at the core of the disease. Solve your sleep, solve the illness.