Thoughtful Thursday: Losing Sleep

Turns out I spoke too soon in my last post when I said that the only time I’ve lost sleep during this pregnancy was the night before the nuchal scan. Monday night, I was up for 3 hours after DH went to bed, filled with Dead Baby Thoughts.

Wednesday night, I was up for 1.5 hours after DH’s bedtime… not from anxiety, but from poo problems. My body apparently refuses to let me sleep until all is well in the digestive tract.

I’d say, though, that 95% of the insomnia I’ve experienced in my life was TTC- or infertility-related. As I wrote a while back:

I used to sleep like a log, all the way through the night no matter what. All my life I slept like a log — too soundly, even; I have slept through major earthquakes, fire alarms, and too many alarm clocks. As soon as I started charting, I kept waking up many times throughout the night, wondering if it was time to temp yet. Never mind the fact that DH would wake me at the proper time. I was so eager — it’s funny to imagine now. I have barely slept through the night in the seven years since then, even though I gave up on charting over 4 years ago.

Aside from the above, I can literally think of three other times, aside from rare occasions when I’ve been kept up by illness, that I’ve been unable to sleep for hours at a time.

1. The night before the first day of 6th grade. I’m not sure why I was so excited, but it seemed it would be the most thrilling first day of school ever. I don’t think I slept the whole night, and instead I calmed myself with deep breathing techniques far beyond what an 11-year-old should have the wherewithal to do at 4am. In the morning, I had my mom fix my hair in a tidy bun (the only one I ever wore to school in my whole life, though I wore a bun to ballet class) to camouflage my exhaustion.
2. My wedding day. I went to sleep fine, but I woke up 4 hours before I needed to. I did some last minute tasks, and danced frenetically around the living room to The Monkees.
3. The night before a job interview four years ago. I had a series of interviews all around the country, but there was only one for which I couldn’t sleep, almost the whole night. It turned out to be the job I ended up with. I spent 2 hours sleeping and 6 hours in my friend’s guest room watching Season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (she had the whole series). I made a pretty good dent in the first season that night, and eventually went on to watch the rest of the series at much more reasonable times of day.

What about you? What causes you to lose sleep? If applicable, what percent of your sleepless nights are the result of infertility?