Restless Nights

When I was in high school I had no problem staying up late, although I was known to fall asleep on top of my bed studying or something of the sort in the middle of the night. Once I reached college I continued to stay up late (usually talking on AIM to Ryan), but still managed to get up for my early morning classes with no problem. I’m not really sure when I started having difficulty staying awake but I believe it was sometime during my second semester at school. I noticed that I was really tired all the time and Ryan still teases me because I would fall asleep on the phone or computer while talking to him. At one point it got to be really embarrassing. I was sitting at a friend’s dorm hanging out with a bunch of people and proceeded to fall asleep on the couch in the middle of the “party”. My sophomore year I moved into an apartment with three girlfriends and we remained in that apartment until we graduated. There are numerous pictures of me falling asleep on the couch, on one of their beds while talking, driving in the car on road trips. You name a place, I have probably fallen asleep there. It was so easily noticeable that even my friends in Italy picked up on it right away because they liked to laugh at me falling asleep on our bus tours. All of this is in good humor which didn’t seem to be a problem because I could still stay out and live the college life. Once I graduated college things went downhill quickly. I no longer had a reason to stay up late but that still did not help my falling asleep on the couch any chance I sat down. I have seemed to snap out of that a little bit but now I am encountering another problem. I can’t stay asleep. I have been known to fall asleep on the couch around 9:30pm and then my husband so kindly wakes me up so I can get in bed. Again, I have no problem falling back asleep. The problem comes between 2:30-4:30am. I wake up EVERY night during this time. I usually have to go to the bathroom, sometimes twice a night. Then I cannot fall back asleep, so I lay there thinking of every possible idea that pops in my head. That is usually when everything that is going on in our life decides to pop into my head and I have to contemplate every possible outcome. I have tried just counting myself back to sleep, if I count then I won’t think of everything else. I then end up counting to ten over and over and over again. I have tried to stop drinking anything after 8pm, because I don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night and I still do. I cannot figure it out, I’ve always been one to wake up in the middle of the night usually around 5am, but easily fall back asleep, not this. Ryan likes to tell me you were asleep when I woke up, haha. He can sleep through anything. The likelihood of him actually waking up in the middle of the night is very slim. He did however comment the other day that I was up every time he was up. He did happen to wake up twice and both times I was wide awake, the difference is he fell back asleep in two seconds.  See, I was up, I'm not lying!  So at this point I don't know what to do!  I can't keep having such restless nights!