After working several days in a row with crazy hours I tend to need extra sleep on my first day off. I have a hard time sleeping also when I know I have to get up early. I think I worry about the alarm not going off or oversleeping and being late so I sleep really light and wake up all hours of the night.

When I was little I couldn’t go to sleep without the radio on. I got out of this habit for a while when my children were babies but now that I are older I’ve taken to leaving the TV on. I usually can’t go to sleep without it on but I have to have the volume turned down low where it fades in to a sort of background type of noise. If it is too loud when I’m trying to sleep then it will disturb me.

Sometimes however there will be something that I really want to watch and I will sit down to watch it and fall asleep especially if it is late in the evening and I’m really tired. It seems to more I want to watch something to more likely I am to fall asleep. Isn’t that weird?

I also find if I absolutely can’t sleep sometimes eating something sweet and drinking a cup of milk will somehow help me to sleep. I think it is brought on by hypoglycemic symptoms actually and after I eat the sweets it makes me sleepy instead of giving me a sugar rush.

I have trouble sleeping some times when I get a lot of things on my mind. Like the bills and issues with my kids and my ex husband and things like that. Well another reason the TV helps it kind of drowns out all chatter in my brain that is keeping me awake.

My husband and I refer to that chatter as hampsters because of a song we heard called death to hampsters which was about that very subject.

At times my nap turns into a 6 hour nap so I will just stay up all night and go to work. Working East Coast hours. For 12 years my sleep schedule is all messed up. I can’t sleep with the TV on at night but I can during my nap.

I don’t wake up at all during my naps or night sleep. NEVER! I hear how some people do. I have been known to sleep talk or walk when I am super stressed. It is always talking about work too. Like Market tickets and such. Obviously it is always stress that makes me do this.

Sometimes I will wake up from my nap and look at the clock and when it reads 6 or 7 I freak out thinking I have slept in and now I am late for work only to find that its 6 pm or 7 pm not AM. That happens at least once a week.

Once I even started to go and wake my son up to get ready for school only to realize he was downstairs watching TV because it was evening not morning. I always think about putting a note on the clock that it is PM but I am usually too tired to do that.

I truly love my sleep and need but just haven’t found a good schedule yet and by the time I get off work my brain is fried so I NEED that nap.