My love-hate relationship with caffeine

In my never ending chase of sleep and wakefulness, I seem to have developed a hatred of my need for caffeine to get through the day. That photomicrograph of a caffeine crystal is beautiful isn't it?
When I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder nearly two years ago, I had tapered my caffeine use to drinking one good size mug one half-caff/half decaf in the morning and the rare diet cola when I was out with family. Sometime around the time I met my husband a year and a half ago, the coffee habit had started to drift away to nothing and my caffeine intake consisted of occasional imbibing of tea, cola and dark chocolate. Though I complained back then of poor sleep, somehow I wasn't grabbing the external chemical stimulation of good ole C₈H₁₀N₄O₂.
Over the past several months sleep became a chore and the afternoon pick-me-up of a cold Green Tea evolved to Diet Coke to share with Dave while we were out running errands. Eventually a few times a week thing became a suggestion from Dave to just go ahead and add coffee to my morning routine again.
It's not the same. What was once a morning quiet time ritual of gradually meeting the day is gone. The coffee ritual is different when I roll out of bed exhausted and still half stoned from my medications at 2 in the afternoon. To swipe the cobwebs of sleep out of my brain, I gulp the stimulating chemical of caffeine into my system, resentful of the bitter brew I had once enjoyed without such need. I want my simple enjoyment of coffee back. Drinking coffee at 2 in the afternoon screws up my desire to get back to a normal sleep-wake cycle given the 6 hour half life of the chemical in the body.
My search continues for a better, gentler way to wake up a medicated woman with bipolar disorder and insomnia in the "morning" without interfering with the end of the day desire for sleep. Perhaps I'll stick to chocolate.

Chasing sleep and staying awake

Chasing a restful night's sleep seems to be a never-ending quest in our house. Dave and I both have difficulties sleeping. It seems that sleep problems are par for the course for those of us living with bipolar disorder. Right now both of us are living in a nearly upside down clock. Dave is a complete night owl. While I tend to head to bed around midnight or so, he is up much later. We both tend to get up around the same time though!

Looking over my old blogs from Myspace, it seems that my struggles with sleep have been around for as long as I can remember. Last fall I had a sleep study done with all the wires of an EEG, mic and video (the technical term is polysomnography). It took months to chase down the results because my family doctor (recalling this without the report in hand) just assured me that I wasn't about to die suddenly from sleep apnea and didn't have restless leg syndrome and nodded, yes, she'd fax the results to my psychiatrist (who'd requested the family doc make the referral in the first place). Weeks later at the psychiatrist's office we get the sleep clinic to fax the report directly, skipping the inefficient family doc. We find that I have subclinical sleep apnea. Which basically means that I do stop breathing during my sleep (4 times during the 6-hour study), but not often enough for clinical intervention (people with severe problems stop/wake at least that often an hour). So what's this sleepy and moody woman to do?

Well, for the past week, it's been an increase in dosages of my medications. While my mood definitely has improved, the length of my waking day has decreased to approximately ten (count 'em 10) functional hours. I also don't like the glued to my bed feeling in the mornings that seem to keep that day short. Declaring the hours to be functional is stretching it, too. I have housework backed up, but the dark of the evening is not when I want to be moving around energetically doing the perky-er housekeeping. So, each day I go to bed earlier praying to wake at a decent hour in the morning to get a head start on the things I want to get done.

While winter tends to be a good season for me, unlike many people dealing with mood disorders, I don't like completely missing the daylight. The sunlight-colored lamp Dave and I use in our computer area helps, but again, with the short day, it can only do so much.