How many hours of sleep a night do you need? - Now with Poll

Interesting. Thanks for that. I use slow release 2mg tablets on prescription. I've tried over the counter brands before and they made no difference at all.

I find that with the slow release version I will sleep but then wake after about 5 maybe 5.5 hours. That's not quite enough.

It will be interesting to see how the NAC stacks up.

Incidentally, I had trouble finding & ordering the sustained release one from the UK - they wanted something like £20 or more for 100 tablets. Whereas 3*100 tabs from iHerb worked out at about £37 pounds and under £2 p&p

 

Are you in the UK? If you are then I have bad news.

Buying something from abroad (outside the EU) that costs over £15 will attract a demand for VAT (20% of the declared cost of the product and the postage) and a delivery charge which depends on who delivers it.

You might be lucky - customs might miss your parcel. But they don't miss very many.

 

Not yet, but I've long wanted to. Instead I use ordinary hashish, decarboxylated and diluted in butter. The mixing with butter has chiefly the purpose to facilitate dosing, but it might possibly facilitate also the uptake in the intestines.

It made a huge difference for me when I started, some four years ago.
Suddenly, the formerly frequent sleeplessness almost disappeared.

I'd then tried "almost everything" on the market: benzodiazepines, antihistamines, magnesium, wine, beers and melatonin. This cannabis-butter was an improvement compared to all those preparates of our Western school medicine. Seemingly, the quality of sleep increased a lot. Suddenly, the mornings became my best hours of the day.

(And to answer the initial question by @Alvin:
Nowadays, I seem to do well on only eight hours, although sometimes towards ten hours. I seldom sleep in the days, but I do rest a lot in-between "exertions" like reading on the computer.)

After approximately one year of steady use, although with some nights purposely skipped, I discovered that my sleep (and sleep onset) were improved also on these unmedicated nights. And now, some years later, I can skip the cannabis many evenings, without much of a penalty.

P.S.:
In case someone wonders how much I pay, it's about 1€/day, or less.

P.P.S.:
The text above might one day be rewritten into some kind of blog post.
But I haven't done that yet. :/

 

Great! I can guarantee they won't miss mine! I daresay, you also have to go and collect from somewhere that's a nightmare to get to so you can hand over the dosh.

Oh well, it's already been despatched anyway.

 

@Invisible Woman I take this one NAC It is sustained release. It's sold in the U.K but not sure if it's less expensive than ordering from the U.S.

It is only 400mg NAC sustained with added 100mg R+ ALA.

 

Thanks @Mij. That's coming up at £35 for one month supply. That's even more expensive than the Jarrow 600mg one in the UK.

The order has already been despatched so I might as well wait and see.

 

You can get more info from these links :

https://www.gov.uk/goods-sent-from-abroad

https://personal.help.royalmail.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/7208/~/help-with-customs-fees

I believe you can pay any Fees due online, and then arrange for delivery after payment. I doubt that people are forced to collect their own parcels. Edit : If they don't want to.

 

25+ hours

 

At first, the absurdity of this answer had be me laughing out loud

But then I wondered, maybe there's some deeper message that I'm missing?

Does this mean that some people with ME have the exact same level of bad symptoms whether they rest or not? Whether they sleep a few hours, or 8 hours, or 12 hours? Their symptoms don't vary at all, don't improve with any amount of resting or sleeping?

Or is it just a joke that we need some impossible amount of sleep in order to get back to normal? (i.e., sleep does not fix our underlying problems)

 

Yes, I think that's pretty much the definition of unrefreshing sleep at its worst: you wake up feeling just as bad as when you went to sleep. It's certainly been part of my experience.

I think it's hard for healthy people, or anyone who feels better for sleeping, to realise how unpleasant it is for sleep to not bring any relief. Especially day after relentless day.

I rarely feel better for sleeping, but every now and then I will feel as if I've actually slept (even though still not enough), and it makes a huge difference to how rough and drained I feel, and makes me realise in comparison just how constantly debilitating poor sleep is. It's been going on for so long that I've forgotten what normal feels like

I don't even know how much sleep I need anymore because I never get enough (in quality terms)!

 

I once saw a sign that said open 25 hours. I don't know if it meant a day, week, year, lifetime

 

I would like to sleep 10 hours, but if I sleep more than 8 I mess up my fragile circadian rhythm in just a couple of days. The exception is sometimes when I’ve overdone it physically (but not too much, that’ll make me unable too sleep at all) and can do some extra hours without causing trouble.

 

Thanks for your reply - makes sense!

I meant to respond earlier but forgot.

I think when I posted my earlier questions my foggy brain was conflating two issues - rest vs. sleep:

I think pretty much every ME patient feels worse after exertion, right? So they would see a difference in symptoms after exertion (usually delayed - PEM) vs. after resting? Which means they wouldn't have the exact same level of symptoms 24/7 whether they rested or not?

If an ME patient felt exactly the same after doing activities as they did after resting then I would be confused! Because what about PEM? (again, maybe I'm not explaining this very well, I'm bad with words)

But sleeping is a different thing from resting.

Having unrefreshing sleep most or all of the time would really suck! I'm so sorry for those who have that.

I'm lucky in that some days I do feel better (well, "less bad") after a night's sleep. Other days, yep, I wake up feeling just as bad as when I went to sleep. So my sleep quality is not 100% unrefreshing. It varies. And some of this may be related to the PEM time delays which are hard for me to compute because they also vary.

But resting, while it may take days before I start to see a reduction in my symptoms, is always better for my symptoms than doing some kind of activity.

In short, my symptoms are not the same 24/7. Maybe there are some ME patients who have no variation in symptoms but I thought all would get worse after any exertion. I hope that make sense.

Sorry for my foggy brain and incoherent questions earlier. I just re-read this, and I wonder whether I just made things more confusing, but I hope not!

 

I have this issue as well, though i cannot get by on 8 hours, i will crash and sleep 12-16 hours in a few days to a week so i have never been able to figure out if 8 hours will keep my body clock stable or not.

 

So everyone feels as bad when they wake up as when they went to sleep? No one feels worse after waking? Or is that just me? A lot of the time I wake feeling a lot worse than when I, eventually, got to sleep, and then, a variable number of minutes later, feel even worse still. Not every day, possibly not even most days (who can be sure), but enough of the time, and it runs in streaks, can wake okay, then crumple a few minutes later and be good for nothing all day, or, cam wake, actually feeling good, and crumple a few minutes later (rarely more than fir 1 morning)......

.....sorry, that was getting complicated/convoluted.

My point was that there are several scenarios, for various stages, and these can occur in different orders, and that one of them is feeling considerably worse after sleep, as opposed to, what people seem to be posting as normal, just not refreshed.

 

Not quite, i am a bit better usually when i am caught up on PEM and mental exertion, but not great, my best day would be crap for a on ME/CFS person.

 

I usually feel better at night than when I wake up, but during the rare times when I’m ahead in the pacing game I can wake up feeling pretty ok (though not rested).

 

Generally, I feel really ill when I wake up. I never wake feeling well. Sometimes the awful feeling fades in half an hour, sometimes it doesn't fade at all and usually it's somewhere in between.

With regard to resting - resting does not make me feel significantly better, but it stops me feeling worse. So, if I rest as soon as I am aware I need to then it will stop me feeling worse than I already do at that point, the longer I leave it the worse I get until I rest. In an ideal world I would rest just begkre I feel I need to for max benefit, but then I would achieve nothing, ever.

 

That reminds me, the headaches from the first few hours after waking up i used to get are reduced by methylfolate and B12, according to a few studies this reduces homocysteine levels in the CSF. No proof this causes the headaches but it either is or is a coincidence or a parallel/comorbid mechanism.

 

I think low blood volume is my biggest reason for feeling like crap in the morning. Lots of water, salt and a couple of hours to wake up usually takes the edge of. And a giant mug of coffee.