One simple practice was a lifesaver for Darden
Insomnia can be a terrible thing. Combine it with night sweats and you’ve in real trouble. Darden, who had both, was sleeping so little at night that she was near suicidal – until she came upon a simple, cheap practice that she says saved her life.
Find out how she did that plus check out some other affordable ways to improve your sleep in
The Lifesaver: ME/CFS/FM Patient Finds Simple Way to Get Sleep
An additional point about my experience with hand warming is that I often needed to repeat the hand warming technique multiple (5-7) times a night because the night sweats came back. I went from not sleeping much at all to sleeping with many interruptions. I think this is because the underlying source of stress on my body was still there but I was able to manage it in short durations of time. This of course is not ideal but a lot better than before.
Night sweats is probably hypoglycemia, as is lunatic nightmares. I had years of this, and still find my best bet for sleep is carb-loading. I can re-introduce the same old horrific insomnia symptoms just by going on a low-carb diet.
“I had years of this, and still find my best bet for sleep is carb-loading.”
That surprises yet fascinates me. I tend to have increased sleeping problems with food that causes big sugar spikes when eaten late afternoon or later.
Could it be that you use easy-to-digest carb-loaden food that does contain a lot of slower carbs like starch but few fast sugars? Does this food has a lot of fiber in it slowing carb uptake and spread it over the night?
Thanks in advance,
dejurgen
I somehow am not able to respond on the blog in the provided link, so I’ll do it here.
“It affects the “wired tired” condition associated with CFS/ME but not in my opinion the flight/flight response associated with emotional stress.”
I believe a great finding of you could be that it is not just about calming the CNS but rather “guiding/controlling/stimulating” the CNS to increase/adjust blood circulation. That sets the technique miles apart from the “just relax and calm down and you’ll be better and heal” nonsense.
If other meditative/autogenic/visualisation/… techniques work it may be trough the same mechanism of action. If one has a better clue as what to influence it’ll likely increase success rate. If one tries to obtain calming success rate may be lower due to affecting the wrong subsystem for example.
There are other clues that seem to guide in this direction. Many techniques mentioned in the link seem to be either a meditation technique, a physical way to improve blood flow or a breathing technique or a combination thereof. Your information may indicate that the meditation technique improves blood flow. Some breathing techniques can influence blood flow too. Their effect may more depend on being able to breath optimal all day long including while at sleep. These side conditions may effect success rate here.
I experience preliminary positive results with a combination of nightly physical stimulation of blood flow and breathing techniques. Remarkably my worst hours are in the 3 to 5 am range too. And waking up interval decreases from about 2 hours at the start of the night to 1 or 0.5 at morning.
Just as Dawn in http://simmaronresearch.com/2017/08/sleep-reduced-immunity-vicious-circle-mecfs-fibromyalgia/ I experience mildly positive results from low doses of stimulants; it relaxes me ;-). I guess it could be due to the effect on blood flow and breathing that many of those products have. Good side-effect tolerance is a strong plus for achieving success with these.
The “stress” we experience may be a pure physiological one. Reducing the need to have such reaction, likely by improving blood flow to an optimal level, reduces then the observed level of stress.
Thanks for creating and sharing another possible piece of the puzzle Darden!
Dejurgen, so you think the ‘stress ‘reaction’ is for compensation? For better bloodflow? I think this is right.
Yes, a stress reaction is potentially helpful when the body and more important the brain are over exhausted or under severe danger.
To a healthy person that could be over exhaustion from months of heavy emotions or from a cashier that needs to work at a pace he can’t otherwise keep up with every single day.
To me, it can be things that require hand-eye coordination like slicing vegetables or it can be driving a car in too busy traffic. My brain is too slow to do them well and safely. It’s also keeping proper blood flow and breathing at the bare minimum when metabolism slows down at night. Dardens temperature feedback may be a clever way to redirect “stalled” blood to the hart increasing blood flow to the entire body including to the brain.
I use noticing an increase in anxiousness when doing something as an early warning that I am overexerting my brain too much. It saved me many times a PEM.
It not always has to be increasing blood flow, but as you state improving. Next to that for example adrenaline, part of near any stress response, increases breathing and liver functioning. The latter could be of help for us to remove ROS and other toxins and to convert increased lactic acid to glucose again. Those things are often byproducts of poor blood flow.
I noticed that exhausting my adrenals makes it near impossible for me to get stressed about anything at all, even if I definitely should worry.