@SwanRonson ,
You've got a few things to look into in the responses here that have a good probability of helping, either with what went wrong or how to help. I have a nurse practitioner who straddles east and west forms of medicine. Her approach is listen, guess, test, revise guesses, treat, retest. My first visit resulted in 23 vials of blood for testing (at the lab). Sometimes I prefer to try a treatment first, if it meets my three criteria: Probably won't hurt, might help, doesn't cost a lot. What you do may depend on if and who you have to work with, costs, and insurance.
Some things you could try:
BCAA (branch chain amino acids). If you body is turning catabolic like
@Martial said, BCAA will help you get to sleep and sleep well immediately. I used Source Naturals, and followed the instructions on the bottle. I was sleeping a max of 3 hours a night at least 5 nights a week. I slept the first night I used it, and every night until I ran out. Although I was eating 2 lb of ground meat (lamb, bison, turkey) per week, I wasn't digesting it and lost about 15 lbs of muscle until I started using the BCAA.
Gut-healing products. If you tolerate dairy, colostrum may be a good place to start. 5 grams twice a day perhaps. It seems to be changing my life. Glutamine is one, too, but it's already covered in the BCAA in most brands. The kinds of fiber for gut healing are inulin and larch (arabinogalactins). There's the 4R Gut rebuilding program that has a lot of suggestions (
@caledonia wrote a good summary), and there's the "Fixing leaky gut" thread where Hip posted his list of products.
For some reason that my logical mind can't reach, my intuitive mind says Epsom salt baths - that you need the transdermal magnesium to restore your sleep cycle. Hmmm, that intuitive mind rarely speaks up. Do what you will with it.
The cortisol-blood glucose-insomnia relationship is complicated. Essentially, the liver needs cortisol (or a substitute like prednisone) to make blood glucose. If your cortisol is high or the pattern is wrong (it should be higher in the morning and tapering until about 5 am), it will cause insomnia. If your cortisol is low, you'll experience hypoglycemia, which can also keep you awake. (It did me, about 18 months after I solved the BCAA issue. I would go to bed, sleep for 1-2 hours and be awake until about 5:30. I figure that was when my cortisol was high enough for my blood sugar to get high enough for me to sleep. I also had achy pain in the kidney area at night and dizziness, nausea, hypoglycemia, and fainting with stress, etc. during the day.) The mainstream medical profession believes saliva cortisol is only useful for diagnosing high cortisol or bad patterns. Serum cortisol is useful for diagnosing low (hypo) conditions. Cortisol is definitely worth testing, as treating it the wrong way can be dangerous. I tried phosphatidyl serine complex, which lowered my already low cortisol and slept even less.
So, those you can do quickly to see if they help, but I really would suggest you work with a doctor. It seems you have enough going on that I (in your shoes or your doctor's shoes) would really want a complete workup - CBC, chemistry, lipid panel, hormone panels (cortisol, DHEA, testosterone), amino acid panel, and stool analysis with parasites. Something went wrong, and it's hard to tell without more data.
Best of health!