barefooter
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- Aug 22, 2013
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- 218
James_001 said:post 112341 How did you get your sleep in order? I think I may have been experiencing the same thing, and for me it also was caused by intense psychological stress. Also, do you take thyroid? I agree it is a difficult hole to transcend simply because a lack of sleep drains all of your energy required to solve the problem and thus the cycle repeats itself.
It's a bit hard to say, as I actually did a bunch of stuff and it's hard to pinpoint what really helped. Initially, I started taking 500-1000mg b1, some k2, aspirin, and l-ornithine (maybe 2g) before bed and trying to get to bed earlier. At first it didn't seem to do much, but then I started waking up before my alarm feeling refreshed, which was highly unusual for me. I would typically be woken up from my alarm and snooze for nearly an hour after 8 to 9 hours of sleep, and finally get up feeling like ***t.
Initially, I attributed the sleep improvement to the supplements, but now I'm not so sure. I've discontinued the l-ornithine, as I'm not so sure it's safe long term, but I still tend to take b1 and k2 before bed, and I think they may help to keep the metabolic rate higher during sleep. I really think the number one thing for me is getting to bed early. It seems the earlier I can get to bed the better I sleep. I try to be in bed by 10 at the latest, which requires a lot of discipline at first.
However, once I got in the habit of it and saw the marked improvement in my morning and all day really, I started getting excited to get to bed early. Now it's pretty routine for me. and I'd say 4 out of 5 days I'm up before my alarm, usually by 5:30 to 6:30. I have a 250w heat lamp that I turn on first thing in the morning, which I think has been a big help in regulating circadian rhythm, and I tend to lay under it after work most days too. I think the more bright light you can get during the day the better your sleep cycles will be.
I don't take thryoid, but I've been gradually upping my caffeine intake. When I was having really bad depersonalization, I could barely tolerate caffeine. I felt great for an hour, and then would crash to a really dark place where I'd feel spaced out, disassociated, and paranoid. Not good times! I think getting my diet sorted out and higher doses of k2 have helped. I'm now up to 600+mg per day between coffee and caffeine power, and it's working really well for me. I'm going to keep increasing my dose and see how things go.
I've also really been getting my diet dialed in and getting regular exercise too, which have been very beneficial for me in getting over the psychological stress. Oh, and I found creatine to be useful. I take 5g/day and it seems to help with mood, concentration, and gains at the climbing gym. Anyway, I guess I've made a whole bunch of positive changes, so like I said really hard to pinpoint what was most important. But I think the first mental shift was also really important, just deciding that my sleep was a huge factor in my issues and taking getting it dialed in very seriously.
I think there's also a time factor in recovering from psychological stress and depersonalization. There were months on end where I thought things seemed like they weren't getting much better, but I was healing a little bit each day just by being out of that stress. It's important to be able to look at things and say, well I'm not 100% yet, but I feel better than last month, so that's good. When things move slowly like this, it can be a bit easy to loose hope, but believing that the condition is stress induced and will be reversed by getting away from those stressors can help
James_001 said:post 112341 I am also interested in this cult if you don;t mind sharing. Not that I want to join, just curious about the working of the cult and how you ended up there etc....
If it is too difficult to speak about I understand.
I'd actually love to talk about it, as I'm now past the terror (pretty sure I had PTSD from it), and I really did learn a lot about the functioning of cults there. I actually took a ton of notes and photos and am going to write a long article about it at some point. I'm still at work, but I'll respond tonight about my experience there.
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