Oh, that's just crappy. Could you list the meds and supplements you take, hon? And give us an idea of what you eat? Blood sugar may be a factor here. There are a few different ways of stabilising blood sugar, so something that works for someone else may not work for you.
Meditation techniques may help, if you can manage them. I am very fond of an Android App called Peaceful Breathing Lite, and I say this as someone who's crap at doing meditation/breathing exercises.
Also look at your exposure to light and darkness. They're the main things which set your body clock and control hormones such as melatonin. To be specific, it's blue light and the absence of blue light which does this. You're obviously not up to going outside at the moment, but try dimming the lights a few hours before bed. If you can, try yellow or orange lighting. It's cheap to buy a single bulb, put it in a lamp and see how you get on with it. You would also then need orange filters to put over computer and TV screens, as they emit an awful lot of blue light and really do keep people awake. Alternatively, you could use the software f.lux, but you'd need to set it to "darkroom setting" to filter out all blue light, and that makes your entire screen red and is generally rather hard on the eyes, I find. Although it may work perfectly for other people, I have no idea! Anyway, the idea is to filter out all blue light, don't even get a bit of it, from about three hours before bedtime until you get up the next day. It's easy to try, cheap (well, at this stage. I ended up getting prescription glasses made up with an orange tint, but believe me, it was worth it), and if it works, it's really noticeable. I find that it's similar to a strong sleeping tablet. I was on a 25 hour day before I started playing with light therapy and darkness therapy, by the way. You can also use bright lightboxes in the morning to help set your sleep pattern, if that's gone wonky, but I find the darkness therapy is enough to do that, and winding down is evidently your main problem. I wrote a blog about this at
In Search of Mornings.
The other thing that occurs to me is that if I get the odd night like this, I take some diazepam or temazepam, but only for the occasional night, as it's highly addictive. I get occasional rough nights due to Restless Leg Syndrome, which your symptoms sound a bit like, actually. What are your legs up to when all this is going on? The woman who staffs the RLS helpline actually used the exact same phrase about putting your finger into an electric socket. RLS is about low dopamine, apparently, and in many cases is caused by low ferritin (iron).
Also I felt like this for months when coming off gabapentin, and have had similar reactions to a few other meds (all on the "may make RLS worse" list). Have you come off any meds recently?
