With my new Fitbit I’ve been monitoring my sleep over the past week or so. I’ve averaged about 8 hours nightly, which is the recommended amount for adults, and found very interesting results. Nearly every night my REM sleep was much shorter than it should have been, generally around 15%, which is half of what it should be. You can see on my chart that as the night goes on I begin to get numerous awakenings interrupting my REM phases. A normal sleep pattern should show REM stages gradually increasing in length throughout the night to where I would eventually get the full necessary amount of REM which is around 30%. Mine instead only last a brief period of time before immediately turning into me waking up.
If the brain doesn’t get enough REM sleep it creates a sleep debt and you start to need more and more of it. As this sleep deprivation becomes more severe, you can get a HUGE amount of problems, but one of the most significant here for me is that severe sleep deprivation can result in paranoia, hallucinations, delusional thinking, aka psychosis. Your brain literally just starts to force you to dream while awake. This to me explains basically everything I have ever wondered and confirms my suspicions that the root of my lifelong psychosis has in fact been a sleep disorder. It also explains why if I get an excessive amount of sleep, i.e. 11 hours, I no longer have any psychosis symptoms or sleep attacks where I absolutely have to nap. Longer period of time asleep=more REM cycles, thus making up for them being short and interrupted. The quantity makes up for the quality.
So the ideal here would be to find a way to keep me asleep at night so I don’t wake up practically every time I go into REM. However this is not easy given that every sleep aid I’ve ever tried either did not work or lost effectiveness after a given period of time. So I’m still working on that so that I don’t literally have to sleep half the day every day to stay sane. But this is so exciting to me to find out because the scientific community still has no idea what causes type II narcolepsy, and this may be the answer! (Though of course to confirm that I’d need to run a larger study with more precise equipment, but this is a good foundation!)
Just thought I’d share because this is another huge step in my journey towards recovery.
