Five months since I came back from burnout leave. I'm in bed by ten, asleep quickly, up at eight, and by eleven in the morning I'm ready to lie down again. The GP ran bloods and everything came back normal, which I'm grateful for and also slightly stuck on. Did unrefreshing sleep eventually turn back into ordinary sleep for you, and did anything specific move it?
Disagreeing with the standard sleep hygiene sermon, which was actively useless to me in the acute phase — cool rooms and no screens don't touch this. The two things that measurably helped were a fixed wake time regardless of how the night went, and killing the afternoon nap that was quietly stealing my sleep pressure. Daylight in the first hour was the third. Everything else on the usual list I abandoned without consequence.
The fixed wake time is brutal for a fortnight and then it starts paying. Lying in until noon on Saturdays was undoing my entire week and I'd have argued hard that it was helping.
It did shift for me, and slower than I wanted. I kept a one-line log every morning scoring how rested I felt out of five: months one to four were mostly twos, month five had the first threes, and it wasn't until somewhere around month seven that a night's sleep reliably felt like it had done something. Nothing dramatic happened at month seven — I just noticed it had stopped being remarkable to wake up feeling okay. Having the log stopped me concluding every bad week that I'd made no progress at all.
What I did wrong was treat the tiredness as a discipline problem. Caffeine from six in the morning, a five-day gym programme to 'build resilience', and I crashed harder in October than I had in the spring. Adding load to a system that's already failing to recover just moves the collapse. When I finally let myself do genuinely nothing for six weeks, sleep started changing within about a month.
Fixed wake time, no naps, daylight early, and ask about a sleep study. Five months is not long, but it's long enough to ask again.
@day_rate_dee · 3mo ago · 2 replies
Normal bloods rule out some things but they say nothing at all about the quality of the ten hours. I spent a year assuming mine was burnout, and a sleep study found moderate apnea I had no idea about — I wasn't the demographic I expected and I don't snore dramatically. Ask specifically whether a sleep study is warranted rather than accepting 'your results are fine' as the end of the conversation, because unrefreshing sleep with normal bloods is exactly the profile that gets shrugged at.
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@career_ladder_kim · 3mo ago
Worth pushing on. Mine took two GP appointments and a fairly blunt sentence about how long it had been going on before I got referred, and the referral was the thing that changed the year.
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