Life Is Topsy-turvy

All my life I have been a morning person. I have never found it difficult to get up in the morning, and once up I was always raring to go for the day. By 9pm I would be starting to flag and 10pm was my bed-time for many years. I might not go to sleep straight away, most nights I would read for about half and hour and it was not uncommon for me to fall asleep with my book in my hand and still wearing my glasses.

Over the last year or so, I have found that I am becoming a night owl. I no longer find it easy to get up in the morning and it is not unusual for me to still be awake in the early hours of the morning. I know that part of this is caused by depression, but I don't think it explains it completely because even when I am not in the depths of depression, I am staying up later and sleeping well into the morning.

So, it seems as though my life is becoming topsy-turvy, that I am able to function well into the evening where just a couple of years ago it would have been impossible. This means that I am often still knitting at midnight, and it has meant that my eating habits have changed too. I rarely eat breakfast in the morning; my first meal of the day is more likely to be a kind of brunch taken at about 11.30am. My next meal will probably be in the early evening, and if I have a large meal this will be my last meal of the day, or if I have something more akin to a snack then I will probably have something else to eat at about 10pm.

This change to how I spend each 24-hour period is being reinforced by the medication that I am taking for depression. I have recently had an addition to this medication and it has meant that I am at long last getting a decent night's sleep most nights. But it also means that I am finding it even more difficult to get up in the morning. I seem to wake at about 7am to answer the call of nature but I have to go back to bed again because I am so sleepy. I will fall asleep almost as soon as I am in bed again, and will usually sleep for several more hours.

I'm hoping that this extreme sleeping will become less of a problem as my body gets used to the new medication. It makes me wake up with a very dry mouth but while at first that dryness would last throughout the day, I have realised that today that dryness was gone by mid-afternoon. And the extreme sleepiness that I have been experiencing well into the afternoon is now staying with me for far less time. Now I just need to see if I can experience an improvement in my mood so that I don't feel depressed all of the time.