I’ve suffered from insomnia my entire life. It’s been a great handicap for me trying to fit into the standard time of the education/business world. It seems that my body wants to go to bed at 4am and sleep until 2pm or so and nothing I can do can change that schedule. I started taking Tylenol PM years ago and I have to take it every single night or I can’t get to sleep.

Even so it takes from 2 to 4 hours to really work. And sometimes even that doesn’t work. I’ve never been able to be a good breadwinner since most employers want you to work when they want. And that usually means early in the morning.

I find the best thing to do is to try to stay on one steady schedule as much as possible. I try to take the TPM at the same time every night. However after a few weeks I’ll hit a night where it doesn’t work, then I have to try to function the next day on little or no sleep.

After that the lack of sleep builds up until I have to take a day off to “catch-up”. It sometimes takes two or three days to get caught up on my sleep. The whole thing is very frustrating and sometimes it makes me angry, but I have long since learned to come to terms with it.

I have talked to doctors but nothing they could ever do was any more helpful than what I was already doing. I know there are new medications for this condition but I haven’t tried them yet. One of the best things I’ve done is to invest in an expensive “memory-foam” bed that helps me relax and sleep better, once I do fall asleep.

Funny thing though I can’t fall asleep in my bed. I have to fall completely asleep in my recliner in front of the television first. Then I can get up (without waking all the way up) and go to bed. Then I can sleep. With the help of the TPM I can fall asleep by about 2-3 am most nights.