Insomnia........

I have had insomnia on and off since I was a teenager, but it came out in force after I bought my veterinary practice in 2006. Owning a business brings a whole new set of stressors. The buck (or lack thereof) truly stops with me. The SBA loan is astronomically huge and there is also a lien on our house. In addition, there is a million dollar life insurance policy that I had to take out, listing the lender as one beneficiary. I pay a hundred bucks a month for that honor.

I am pretty sure the recession started the day after I signed all of the paperwork making me the owner of the hospital. So I started to stress about if the clients would bond to me, if the staff would stay on, and mostly if I could pay all of the bills. Of course I lost plenty of sleep over all of those things. But I also started to have these middle-of-the-night panic attacks over medical and surgical cases that never used to bother me. I would wake up with a start, wondering if I had miscalculated a drug dose. Or if a spay I performed earlier in the day was bleeding out. You know how your mind works in the middle of the night. I have even drove the 6 miles to the clinic in the wee hours to check on a stable patient more times than I can count.

Well, the anxiety resulted in many hours of lost sleep, which as you know, results in pretty crappy waking hours. I started taking prescription sleeping pills (Ambien), which worked great, but made it hard for me to get up in the morning, especially to work out. When the Ambien ran out, I switched to Benadryl. First one, then two. Then a few months ago I weaned myself off of sleeping aids but soon after was sent on the roller coaster of a breast cancer diagnosis. Back on the Benadryl, then Xanax. Is this how it is to be a typical American in 2011? We don't have to worry about being attacked by animals or other tribes, or where our next meal is coming from, so instead we drive ourselves absolutely insane with relatively minor concerns.

I think we need to chill out a little.

Or, be outside more. I sleep GREAT when camping, or when we were on the beach 6 hours a day in Kauai.

Or, get more exercise. There's nothing like total physical exhaustion to make for a good night's sleep.

Or, lay off the caffeine. I don't drink much of it, but I definitely have a harder time falling asleep if I have caffeine in the afternoon.

Or, meditate. OK, I don't actually do this one, but I wish I did. I even bought a book on it that I have yet to read.

Anyway, I am happy to report that it's been over a week since I've taken any medication to help me to sleep at night. So far, so good. And, I still have my business, and my house, and none of the patients I lost sleep over ever had the complications I was so afraid of. Now the only thing getting me up at night is my bladder, since I'm drinking like 100 ounces of water a day as part of the weight loss competition. See? There's always something...