“THE SLEEP SOLUTION”…Fibromyalgia and Sleep – Book Share III

So I’ve been getting my life back these last five years…my full life…particularly my energy…my time…my feeling of well being. Ever so slowly, but surely, it’s all coming back.

And the major thing I changed?

Sleep.

I FIXED MY SLEEP.

That’s what I attribute it to.

Almost four years ago I wrote in a post “If I could go back and tell my early fibromyalgia self to work on just one thing, it would be to work on getting restorative sleep.” And I’ll tell you, four years later, as MY OLD SELF CONTINUES TO INCREASINGLY EMERGE AGAIN, I still believe that now more than ever!

And wow, I’ll also say, for those of us struggling with the daily chronic fatigue and the nightly painsomnia of fibromyalgia, working on our sleep may feel like the most formidable, if not impossible, task we could face. I know…it took me over ten years to face it.

Now, I’ve already written a couple posts as a layperson trying to convey some key things I’ve experienced myself with respect to sleep and fibromyalgia over the years. But I’ve also read a couple books by foremost sleep experts, so I know enough about sleep to know that finding a sleep solution is not going to be a one size fits all.

But here’s the thing that always strikes me when I read one of these books…when one personally gains an UNDERSTANDING of the inner workings of our brains and bodies with respect to sleep and then sees the SOLUTIONS laid out in front of them, it always amazes me, how easy it is to PINPOINT your specific sleep issue and what you are doing wrong, how much SENSE these solutions make, how incredibly DOABLE they are and how YOU JUST KNOW THEY WILL WORK ONCE YOU NOW UNDERSTAND!

So I wanted to share a resource that I’ve recently sought out in hopes of giving you too the underlying knowledge to hopefully help you too…to fix your sleep.

So let me explain.

The book is “THE SLEEP SOLUTION Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It” by W. Chris Winter, MD.

 And I just want to say, right off the top, as someone who’s had fibromyalgia for over eighteen years now (diagnosed seventeen years ago), I found SO MUCH in this book I could identify with, the good and the bad. As I described in one of my previous sleep posts, “everything fibromyalgia revolves around sleep…got a bit…not enough…need more…need too much…can’t sleep…can’t stay awake…can’t wait to sleep…it’s never enough”…and this book made it all make sense!

Right from the start, the book reinforced (and explained) what I’ve been seeing playing out in my body for over eighteen years now with fibromyalgia. Only, everything I’ve suspected (and much I hadn’t), as simply a layperson, was confirmed by a leading neurologist sleep specialist!

And I really can’t emphasize enough how enthused I was as I learned more and more actionable information while reading this book and how excited I am to be passing it on to you.

I mean, Winter makes this complex issue of sleep especially easy to understand; he clearly explains what can disrupt our sleep, then translates that knowledge into the creation of strategies that are easy to implement, resulting in fairly quick improvements in sleep habits. I found him to be endlessly encouraging with a casual, light-hearted conversational style, while not only reassuring readers that ACHIEVING HEALTHY SLEEP IS POSSIBLE but also showing us how to frame the way we THINK about sleep and how to make the most of the sleep we DO get. And honestly, having fibromyalgia, that had been the name of the game for me for soooo long, making the most of the sleep I did get. (I know you know.)

And having fibromyalgia there’s something else that I really took note of…when Winter assures us that achieving healthy sleep IS possible, that we “absolutely can sleep”, and that he’ll show us why ours isn’t working and help put us back in the driver’s seat…well, this gives me hope for others with fibromyalgia who are struggling with their sleep and have been told that those with fibromyalgia are just not able to get restorative sleep.

This is my second book I’ve read by a foremost sleep expert and I’ve still not seen much credence to this belief that some people just can’t attain healthy sleep as I’ve seen some with fibromyalgia say.

Conversely, Winter explains that sleep is one of the foundational processes within your body that you CAN actually change, and that along with nutrition and exercise, it is one of the three main pillars of good health that we can exert some control over. And when he says that “sleep is an amazingly important process that happens in our bodies” I mean, I don’t need any convincing…I’ve witnessed it and I’ve lived it.

Many many years ago I got my first lesson in how vastly we are affected by poor sleep, far beyond my expectations or my own personal experience at that point. I was familiar with the common concept, if we don’t go to bed in time to get enough hours of sleep (I assumed based on my own experience that when people went to bed, they fell asleep, and stayed asleep)…we will be tired the next day. (Oh, how little did I know back then.)

But my young son, close to twenty-five years ago, set me on a journey of learning about sleep that would significantly change my understanding of how sleep works (and why it doesn’t when it doesn’t) and the far-reaching affects on us of poor sleep, the depths of which I suspect are still not fully known.

I would put him to bed, expecting him to fall asleep in a usual amount of time, and he wouldn’t…he would lie there awake, he would come out of his bed for any reason he could dream up, he would be dead tired, yawning, all the signs of being super tired were there, and still…he would not fall asleep.

And when he started school and had to get up at a certain (early) time five days a week, then the fun began! He wasn’t getting quite enough sleep, often five out of seven nights a week. And it showed, all the effects of consistently inadequate sleep, likely amplified on a little boy his age. His behaviour was affected, his ability to focus, his attention span, his temperament…at times I could see his entire sense of well-being was not intact when he was overtired. And this was when he was short‎ maybe only an hour of sleep each night.

And initially we looked for and tried all the usual things anyone thinks of…an appropriate bedtime, warm milk before he goes to bed, warm bath, a nice consistent low-key bedtime routine etc. etc…it seemed like we were doing all the right things and we had been for years. But I would learn these were all band aid types of approaches that only helped minimally because his particular underlying sleep issue was not being addressed.

I learned this because I delved deeper and I found an excellent book by a foremost sleep specialist.

And honestly, I wasn’t even that far into the book before I knew I’d hit the jackpot! It explained a lot(!)…in terms of what we had been seeing with our son…even things about him that we had no idea were caused by inadequate sleep…we’d thought maybe something else was going on with him too…it explained. Yes, it was all there, all his issues easily explained, all the knowledge of the underlying factors driving sleep, and all the solutions laid out step by step.

Once I understood these underlying factors driving sleep, it became clearly apparent this would be fixable. What had been so puzzling to me…the issues I had been seeing with him…made perfect sense now. And so did the solutions.

So we fixed his sleep.

I found out, in reading the book, that we had been doing almost everything right, but for a couple key things in our routines that we easily changed once we knew what they were. We started near the end of one school year, there were positive changes right away, and two months later when he started back to school a consistently rested little boy, I almost jumped up and down with glee when in our first parent teacher interview of the year, the teacher, who had also taught him the previous year, started out the interview with “He’s a different boy”!

And he actually was like a different boy, in so many ways. There were some surprising changes in him that I hadn’t expected, the consistent lack of sleep had been affecting him far more than I had ever realized (and I had realized he was incredibly affected!). Why, I even noticed a difference in my other two sons who are generally good sleepers with respect to how fast they would fall asleep at night when the odd time we would deviate from these newly learned better sleep routines that our entire household was now doing.

So I’ve witnessed firsthand the stark difference and the all-encompassing impact poor sleep can have on an individual.

I shudder to think of what behaviour disorders teachers would have urged me to get my son diagnosed with and how many diagnoses would have been piled on had this went on for years and likely compounded, had I not figured out that sleep was the underlying issue for him and fixed it early on. And close to twenty-five years later, he still knows how to regulate his system to sleep when he wants to. He knows how to manage his sleep issue for the rest of his life now, no sleep medications needed.

What I had learned that had solved the problem was that our ability to fall asleep and stay asleep depends on far more factors than the surface things that most of us know, and that these factors are affected by things WE can easily do or not do.

Of course, there certainly is a place for these often-seen sleep tips like warm milk, a warm bath, dim lighting etc. before bed that many of us know and do, and I guess for some this may be all they need. But I learned that many of us, like my son, need to make sure the core underlying sleep factors in our bodies are in place or no matter how tired we are, if these physiological things have not happened within our bodies yet, we will not fall asleep.

And I’ll admit I found it fascinating, to be able to understand and fix an issue like this ourselves, so much so that I continued to keep my eyes open over the years, reading everything I’ve come across on sleep issues and sleep advice for close to twenty-five years now, to continue to find any additional tips that may make it a bit easier for him to manage his sleep.

And throughout the last seventeen of those years, since I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, you guessed it…I’ve been gleaning these tips for myself too!

But I was a different case than my son, my sleep problems leading up to when I got fibromyalgia were of my own making…my own decisions to deal with my life circumstances at the time. Maybe that made it easier for me to fix my sleep in the end‎, because I had previously always been a good sleeper. Regardless, these decisions started many years of dysfunctional sleep (sometimes I wonder if it was in fact a contributing factor in causing my fibromyalgia), leading into compounding issues with the chronic fatigue and painsomnia of fibromyalgia as well.

So as I explained in a previous post, after dragging myself through over ten years of living with fibromyalgia, I final got fed up with my own role in my messed-up sleep and I diligently worked on breaking a bad going-to-bed habit that I had fallen into from years of having fibromyalgia fatigue and that I knew was affecting my night’s sleep.

And I broke the bad habit…and it fixed my sleep.

And unbeknownst to me at the time… I would realize a few years later…this was the beginning of ever so gradually fixing my chronic fatigue too!

I would realize later this bad habit that I had finally fixed had been the last thing standing in the way of me getting good restorative sleep; as we’d experienced with my son, I had been doing everything else right. And like my son, the resulting changes have been far more than I ever expected or wished for. I had no idea a few years later I would suddenly realize that it had happened so very gradually that I hadn’t been noticing, but astoundingly, my chronic fatigue was now largely gone!

And I certainly had no idea the far-reaching changes I’d still see trickling in over seven years later, and by changes, I mean specific tangible improvements in my fibromyalgia…and I mean unexpected and astonishing, but totally welcome changes.

Changes like less and less flares and unexplained symptoms…changes like first noticing I was able to keep up with my family’s pace on a holiday again, then more recently realizing that pacing is hardly an issue for me at all any more(!)…changes like noticing a defining improvement in my cognitive skills of being able to competently tackle challenging “thinking” tasks again…changes even recently, being astonished to notice that the slight numbness that had spread to my full body over a decade and a half ago in my early fibromyalgia years is now suddenly gone…and last but not least, changes to my daily sense of wellbeing (I can’t remember the last time I felt that horrid “walking corpse” feeling that at one time was almost a daily occurrence…good riddance!).

And I realize all these gradual changes are little by little “undoing” my fibromyalgia.

Now, I’ve said it many times, I’ve always believed my fibromyalgia is a “brain thing”, that it feels to me like the underlying cause resides with something amiss in my brain.  And of course, I’m not an expert by any stretch but I’ve wondered if the restorative sleep I’ve been getting has been ever so slowly, over the last seven years, HEALING my brain and therefore “undoing” my fibromyalgia.

Whether my messed-up sleep actually was a factor in causing my fibromyalgia or not, regardless I wonder if my good (restorative) sleep is HEALING IT.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever know the answer to that but what I do know, at the very least, without a doubt, MY GOOD SLEEP IS MAKING THE QUALITY OF MY LIFE WITH FIBROMYALGIA ONE HUNDRED PERCENT BETTER!

And for some time now I’ve wanted to be able to help others with fibromyalgia get good sleep and reap the benefits too. But I know enough about sleep to know that simply a layperson such as myself cannot even begin to scratch the surface of, one, conveying the complex knowledge, and two, conveying it in a way that is easy to understand, and meaningful and useful for someone else to help themself to figure out their specific sleep issue and fix it. (I mean, these sleep specialists are physicians and neurologists!)

So I wanted to find a good resource for others like the one I’d found all those years ago. And while I notice a newer edition of that book still tops the “best books on sleep” lists now, it was geared towards children’s sleep issues. So I surveyed the top sleep books by sleep specialists hoping to find a book that would be all that my earlier book had been, only geared to adults…one that would explain the underlying factors and systems in our bodies affecting our sleep…would be solutions oriented…and actionable.

I fairly quickly found “THE SLEEP SOLUTION Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It” by W. Chris Winter, MD right up there on numerous “best books on sleep” lists.

And I wasn’t far into it before I knew why. This book did not disappoint! I knew I had hit the jackpot again with this book…and with it being more expansive for adults and up-to-date on recent discoveries having been published only a few years ago, it was so much more than I had hoped for!

Winter is, in addition to being an internationally recognized sleep-medicine specialist, a neurologist by training and has well over twenty years in the field and it shows. I was thrilled, but not surprised, to find that a neurologist would be a sleep specialist because I hoped this book might shed some light on my own suspicions about a possible link between my sleep and the underlying roots of my fibromyalgia. (And by the way, reading the book has done nothing to allay those suspicions and in fact, has only reinforced their plausibility in my mind.)

As Winter says early on, “While virtually every system and organ of the body is in some way affected by sleep, sleep resides in the brain. This is where sleep both originates and is controlled. Sleep is a neurological state, so when it comes to sleep, the brain is where it’s at.” Then he proceeds to spend roughly the first third of the book explaining sleep with respect to the inner workings in our brains (easy to understand and compelling!) and the rest showing how to overhaul it and the way we think about it.

And I was fascinated throughout as I discovered in detail what he meant when he said, “Your body is doing amazing things at night while you sleep.”

And while I’ve known for a long time the vast affect long term poor sleep can have on us, I was still a little jarred to learn of the actual major implications for our health, here in black and white spelled out by a neurologist. For instance, our brain’s ability to get rid of toxic waste products building up during the day works far better when we are sleeping, which he clearly translates the major implication to us as “Sleep problems screw up your brain and may lead to Alzheimer’s!” (or noteworthy, other neurological disorders). (And he gives a tip of a super simple behavioral change we can make right away that could reduce our risk!)

But this isn’t the worst of it…Winter explains that the effects of long-term poor sleep are most damaging to our heart and circulatory system…with weight gain, diabetes, depression and negative mood consequences, and even recent links to the development of and treatment outcome of cancer, all on the spectrum too…or basically as he says, “We sleep to stay alive.” and “When sleep is not working properly, you don’t work properly.”.

Let that sink in. “WHEN SLEEP IS NOT WORKING PROPERLY, YOU DON’T WORK PROPERLY.” Wow, this single statement succinctly sums up living with fibromyalgia!  I mean, we feel this so directly on a daily basis!

And then there’s our immune system and the fact that it’s function “is intimately tied to the amount and quality of our sleep” and that Winter points to “disturbed sleep as a risk factor for developing autoimmune system disorders.” Another eyebrow raising fact!

But really, the book was full of eyebrow raising facts…our body’s inherent drive to sleep, how much sleep we actually need (Yay! I’ve already arrived at this conclusion for myself and I’m happy to say it’s now confirmed I’m on the right track!)…AND a key thing to know, the DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING SLEEPY AND BEING FATIGUED and how not understanding the difference and climbing into bed when we are fatigued but not sleepy is a recipe for insomnia (I think this will explain a lot for some!).

For myself, Winter’s description of the downward spiral we can get into when fragmented sleep leaves us sleepy but becomes a demand we can’t satisfy because our sleep quality is so poor, really hit home for me. It’s a perfect description of the road I went down. And exactly as he describes I got to the point where “YOU FEEL LIKE YOU COULD SLEEP FOR A WEEK AND NOT FEEL RESTED” (sound familiar!?) and hence began years and years of my dysfunctional sleep life with fibromyalgia.

And while, as those of us with fibromyalgia well know, there can be many reasons for fatigue, and the author readily admits the role that chronic illness may play, he also explains “Understanding your sleep and solving any issues you have are the first steps to figuring out the cause of your fatigue.” Herein lies the primary reason I wanted to look for a good resource for sleep issues for others with fibromyalgia…if we can fix all we can, this could help to mitigate our chronic fatigue or quite possibly, as in my case, gradually totally get rid of our chronic fatigue altogether.

I’ve found each time I’ve done this, read a book written by a sleep expert, and I’ve learned about the systems in our bodies that work to produce sleepiness, the chemicals in our brains that mediate these systems and WHAT WE ARE DOING that either blocks or helps those chemicals, well, understandably, it gets a whole lot easier to know what to do to get better sleep. Period.

And the author explains that most likely these systems are working just fine (nice to hear)…unless we are disrupting them in some way…I now understand I certainly was.

I also now understand what the stages of sleep are, how we transition through them, their functions, and the specific consequences of disrupting them (as I did for so long).

Imagine (as someone with fibromyalgia!) my interest to discover that disruptions in one of the stages of sleep can lead to COGNITIVE DIFFICULTIES such as memory difficulties, attention problems, poor concentration, and POTENTIAL MOOD DISTURBANCES! That during this sleep stage our brain stops REGULATING OUR BODY TEMPERATURE. And that it is now known that one of the most unusual functions of this stage of sleep may be in the REGULATION OF PAIN PERCEPTION! (I know I don’t need to ask if this sounds familiar!)

Now for a long time, the relationship between pain and poor sleep has made sense, when one is in pain one sleeps poorly, of course, and who doesn’t know that better than those of us with fibromyalgia?

But now, Winter explains, studies have examined the REVERSE RELATIONSHIP, that being that POOR SLEEP LEADS TO PAIN, and they’ve found that deprivation of this same stage of sleep that causes so many cognitive difficulties has also been shown to increase the levels of pain experienced by volunteers who were healthy and pain free before the studies! The participants were more pain intolerant and these effects could be seen after only a relatively short period of this sleep stage deprivation.

Furthermore, researchers have now even linked sleep disturbances to the DEVELOPMENT of chronic pain conditions!!!!!!!!!!! I know, that’s a lot of exclamation marks, but I find this stuff mind blowing!

Yes, researchers have now even linked sleep disturbances to the DEVELOPMENT OF CHRONIC PAIN CONDITIONS!!

Let that sink in.

And when you’ve picked your jaw up off the floor, listen to this…Winter goes on to explain which sleep stages are more restorative and why and how disruption of the normal transitions between stages can leave us sleeping with less time in restorative sleep and FEELING POOR and even LIKE WE HAVEN’T SLEPT AT ALL! (Do I need to keep saying it!? Sound familiar?)

He spells out the sleep cycles we go through transitioning from one stage to the other and when much of our deep restorative sleep happens (which explains why my fibromyalgia has improved so much since I fixed my sleep…I now realize my changes allowed me to significantly boost my restorative sleep). He also gives guidelines as to how typically long these cycles are and how many are a good number to go through each night.

Winter describes what cues (and exactly how we can affect them!) help set and synchronize our internal clock every day (our circadian rhythms), and how, when they’re out of whack we get unpleasant symptoms like both SLEEPINESS and DIFFICULTY SLEEPING, DIGESTIVE PROBLEMS, REDUCED MOTIVATION, and IMPAIRED CONCENTRATION/MENTAL FOG. (Um…need I say it again?)

I’m hoping you’re starting to get the picture of what a gold mine “THE SLEEP SOLUTION Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It” clearly is to anyone with a sleep issue. I mean, if you can’t find yourself in these pages, plus something concrete to do about it, well…oh, actually Winter even accounts for that because after helping you figure out what your specific sleep issue is and spelling out the solution, he goes on to point you in the right direction for further follow up.

And as for spelling out those solutions, Winter starts with sleep hygiene where he gives us the foundation needed to fix all sleep problems, those things that we CAN CONTROL, those things that will HELP TO SET OURSELVES UP TO SLEEP SUCCESSFULLY, plus guidelines (and a ton of suggestions!) for an optimal sleep routine. Then, of course, many of us have them, he discusses our habits that work against setting ourselves up to sleep successfully. And while munching in the evening could well be one of those habits, he gives the low-down on how to turn evening munching into a sleep enhancement! Yes!! I’m here for it!

But maybe what I was most intrigued by was Winter’s take on insomnia, explained at length, including the difference between insomnia and sleep deprivation as well as the role of illness and medications. I finally found out what insomnia actually is…truly eye opening and not at all what I expected…but now that I think about it, it explains why I’ve read a comprehensive book by a foremost sleep expert close to twenty-five years ago plus every article about sleep that I’ve come across since then and I still never had any clue what insomnia actually was!

It was almost as intriguing as Winter’s explanation of the role of how we think about our sleep. I had long realized many who think they get good sleep, don’t. But now, to my surprise I find out that many who think they don’t sleep, actually do!

And one of the most fascinating things was the role of our belief about how we sleep and our reaction to it, in how well we function the next day. (It directly explains what I was able to achieve for so many of my years with fibromyalgia.)

And it was a good reminder and reinforcement for me of something I’ve noticed myself relating to my own power with respect to the way I think and how it affects my functioning with the fibromyalgia hand I’ve been dealt. Which reminds me of how intrigued I was to find Winter suggesting a “fake it ’til you make it” strategy for a specific sleep circumstance…he’s arrived at the same tactic that I’ve talked about in a previous post that I do for a specific fibromyalgia circumstance, to help myself to begin to get control of a fibro flare. Interesting!

I was also keenly interested to hear what Winter would say about sleeping pills and he talks at length about them, the why and the what, including a whole slew of sleeping pill options with a good synopsis of each…and the fact that a growing body of evidence is potentially linking some of these pills to memory loss, confusion, or even dementia with prolonged use. He confirmed what has long been my understanding and skepticism about them when he summed it up with “Sedation and sleep are not always the same thing.”

Yet another reason to understand our sleep and learn how to actually solve our underlying issue.

And Winter’s “SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT PIECE OF ADVICE FOR ACHIEVING YOUR BEST SLEEP”? Well, surprisingly, as hard as it can feel to attain good sleep at times, it’s relatively easy to do…within all our power to do!

He then lays out what I think is such an ingenious little sleep schedule exercise (again, that anyone can do) to figure out your own ideal amount of sleep needed, that I truly can’t think there would be anyone at all who’s sleep would not be totally “fixed” after completing this exercise alone!

But when he detailed how to figure out our “sleep efficiency” and guidelines as to what normal sleep efficiency is, here’s where I found a sentence that stopped me in my tracks, having had fibromyalgia for over eighteen years now. “Spending twelve hours in bed to get seven hours of sleep may not leave you feeling sleepy the next day, but it is often going to leave you feeling as if you’d been hit by a train.”

Read that again…”Spending twelve hours in bed to get seven hours of sleep may not leave you feeling sleepy the next day, but it is often GOING TO LEAVE YOU FEELING AS IF YOU’D BEEN HIT BY A TRAIN.”

It’s something so many of us with fibromyalgia can identify with!

And as he related the common fixes that people try when this happens, which he explains only serve to compound the problem…it was exactly what so many of us with fibromyalgia do! It was what I did for so many years when I was stuck in this fragmented sleep pattern until I finally fixed it (which, remember?…incidentally, it gradually led to my chronic fatigue at long last disappearing!).

Which leads me to napping, one of those common fixes…ah…our beloved napping! I would venture to guess most if not all of us with fibromyalgia have had more than our share of naps. I know I have. And I’m also guessing many of us don’t put a lot of thought into the when, where, how long, or even the setting of our naps to ensure they don’t become what Winter describes as “THE BIGGEST MISTAKE PEOPLE MAKE IN TERMS OF THEIR SLEEP”. Again, I know I haven’t. Winter gives us the detailed formula to figure out, optimally, the role napping should play in our lives, how to avoid post-nap funk, and the true purpose it should fulfill for it not to be hindering our night’s sleep…basically for helping us make naps work FOR us instead of against us.

Making naps work FOR us…ahhh, that alone makes reading the book totally worthwhile!!

Yes, we love our naps, but Winter’s book is truly a gold mine in the “complete process for understanding and overhauling our sleep” department.

And included in that, of course, he covers a range of sleep disorders, succinctly, with easy to understand but thorough explanations, including the latest treatments…from Circadian Rhythm Disorders (Shift Work, Delayed Sleep Phase, Advanced Sleep Phase, and Non-Twenty-Four Disorder), Snoring and Sleep Apnea, Restless Legs Syndrome, Narcolepsy, REM Behaviour Disorder, Bruxism/Jaw Clenching (I learned a good tip for working on reducing this) and Parasomnias.

He even gives a complete overview on sleep studies, when it might be advised to get one, what to expect if you go for one (and it does sound easy), how to interpret all the data collected, and guidelines on what to ask of the specialist doing the study. Sleep studies demystified.

Really, Winter’s entire book is…sleep problems demystified.

As for myself, besides giving me a wealth of new and updated knowledge, as well as a few new easy-to-do little tips for triggering sleep that I am excited to be trying, Winter’s book demystified and confirmed what I’d already observed, realized, lived, and fixed…my optimal sleep hours, my fragmented sleep and my limited napping…my morning exercise…my eliminating coffee (I sleep deeper without it) and limiting wine. And I was happy to see my long-time bedtime snack of bananas, plus my more recently added tart cherry juice (I honestly think they both make a difference) on his list of bedtime snack foods that will improve our sleep, plus so many more to choose from.

And by the way, I hadn’t realized when I talked about slowly discovering my “optimal hours” of sleep in an earlier post that I was actually, in a sleep expert’s language, talking about “sleep efficiency”. Incidentally, at the time I wrote that post, I suspected that my optimal sleep (if I could get my schedule right) would be about seven to eight hours a night and I am happy to say I’ve finally mastered a good sleep schedule this past year by limiting my sleep to seven hours (consistently) a night, thus waking feeling rested and restored, leaving me with lots of energy all day, no naps (ever) needed.

And the odd, rare night when I don’t get a good night’s sleep? Well, let’s say it reminds me again that the difference is like night and day for my fibromyalgia between getting a good night’s sleep and a bad one. Night and day.

So I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…“If I could go back and tell my early fibromyalgia self to work on just one thing, it would be to work on getting restorative sleep.” But I would add that I would tell my fibromyalgia self this at any time over the last seventeen years because it is never too late to fix our sleep. (I thought that ship had sailed, I fully expected I’d have chronic fatigue for life, but here I am.)

And as I continue to put getting good sleep a top priority, I hope I will continue to see the improvements in my fibromyalgia.

Now, am I actually healing my brain; is it going that far? Can the brain heal during sleep?

Well, obviously I can’t know. But I can tell you, after reading this book and hearing what Winter has to say about the wonderful things that are happening in our brains during deep (restorative) sleep, I feel more optimistic than ever! And I noticed Winter was excited to point to a recent study showing even genetic tendencies to develop Alzheimer’s can be influenced by better sleep! And as these improvements continue ever so gradually over the years, it does feel like I’m on the road to recovery.

But maybe what matters even more is that the quality of my day-to-day life has increased one hundred percent!

And it started when I fixed my sleep.

And it snowballed as it went.

And finally…I have energy…I have time to do things…and I have a sense of well being…all the time.

So I wanted to share my good fortune with others with fibromyalgia, with you, and I hope I’ve found the perfect resource for you to be able to do it too. You may find, like my son and I, you may have one or two things within your power to change that are holding you up from finally fixing your sleep. Maybe there’s a critical change waiting for you to try, to discover what will be the breakthrough you need for everything to fall into place. I know I will forever be grateful that I tried.

And maybe it’s more complicated for some with fibromyalgia and the chronic fatigue it brings, but again, as Winter says, “Understanding your sleep and solving any issues you have are the first steps to figuring out the cause of your fatigue.” and I have to think he’s right.

But I can’t say it enough, that once you understand the inner workings of our brains and bodies with respect to sleep and then see the solution laid out in front of you, it always amazes me, how easy it is to pinpoint your specific sleep issue and what you are doing wrong, how much sense these solutions make, how incredibly doable they are and how you just know they will work once you now understand!

This book hits the jackpot on this!

So whether it’s for a starting point or ends up being the entire solution, I highly recommend reading “THE SLEEP SOLUTION Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It” by W. Chris Winter, MD. He couldn’t have picked a better title…this book truly is a solutions-oriented guide giving all the knowledge you need to discover what is preventing you from sleeping well, then spelling out real, actionable solutions.

Sleep problems demystified…and solved.

I almost think this book should be required reading for everyone, everywhere.

What I know is real is I think there would be a whole lot less people trapped in the vicious circles that can take us further and further down the rabbit hole of more and more messed up sleep and the resulting health issues, if they only truly understood sleep. I know I certainly would have made different choices.

But the good news is…I learned it’s not too late.

In fact, from what I can tell, I don’t believe it’s ever too late to learn.

Certainly it’s not too late to make changes either.

And it’s not too late to get fixing your sleep!

 

“You are a good person. And you absolutely can sleep. I’ll help.” – W. Chris Winter, MD