First Sleep

Today was the first morning in over a year where I felt well rested and not too drugged up. I finally gave in to the thought that my sleep would never improve with pharmaceuticals (Ativan) and, although I've tried to wean myself off it twice before (Ativan is a drug you have to very slowly (months) wean off of because of the physical dependency it builds and the severe side effects it can have). I will just have to admit that it will take some time - but my quality of sleep cannot suffer any longer. I started to do some research about sleep (I have no idea why it's taken me this long), and found out that there are millions of people out there just like me. The only cure is a purely holistic one, involving re-training your brain to associate day with wakefulness, and the bed with sleep. It's difficult to get the initial part (wakefulness) going in these northern climes, because there just isn't enough sunlight to trigger that effect in your brain (ie: sunlight = shut off melatonin production). I didn't know that your average living room would have maybe 75 or 100 lux of light hitting your eyes, while noon on a sunny day can be as much as 20,000 lux. No wonder the incidences of SAD in Canada are high (especially here in Vancouver, where you get months and months of grey). Regardless, I built myself a crude light box with 6 x 1300 lux flourescent bulbs, and am trying to eat breakfast with this horrendously bright light beside me. It should trigger my brain to recognize morning. In the night-time, I've learned about something called "prior wakefulness" - it's basically that "sleep pressure" builds up during the day, so that the longer you're awake, the more "pressure" there is to sleep. This means going to bed later - for me it's now between 12:00am and 12:30am. It's hard to get your mind around the fact that going to bed earlier has no direct correlation to how well or how much you sleep - only that you'll have more time staring at the ceiling.
This whole experiment in sleep has cost me about $200 (including the light box), so really, if it works, it will have the best ROI I could have imagined. The things that really helped me out were a program called SleepTracks and a book from the library called "Say Good Night to Insomnia" by Dr. Gregg D. Jacobs and Harvard University. They were both invaluable.

PS: I think I've got an explanation to why I got this "sudden bout" of insomnia: Three months in the hospital with little or no physical exercise, low - indoor light all the time, and wintertime in Vancouver.