Ever since the last fall time change, my husband has had issues sleeping through the night. I was pretty worried about it, because sleeping less than 5 hours a night just doesn’t seem right to me. I’m the kind of person who can easily sleep 9 hours a night or more, so for him to be fine with 6 is totally foreign to me. But the issues weren’t that he was sleeping 6, but less than that.
I looked at home remedies for sleep, and tried lowering our temperature at night. That seemed to do the trick, to an extent. He was getting up to 7 hours, and most nights more than 6. I wondered what would happen when we got to the spring forward time change. I hoped it would take my husband back to normal sleep patterns.
I’ll admit that my interest in his sleep is partially selfish. I sleep much better when he’s in bed with me. Just knowing that he’s there helps me sleep more deeply.
Unfortunately, the spring forward did not bring him back into sleeping longer. If anything, he’s been sleeping a bit less since the spring time change. I was starting to get worried and thought about medical intervention until this very morning when we talked about it.
He mentioned that his sister remembered him always having sleep issues when they were growing up and it just went off like a lightbulb in my head. For most of the years that I’ve been with Ambrose, he has been on blood pressure medication. He was, at one point, on 4 blood pressure medications. Now he’s down to a half dose of 1 bp med.
Of course he’s sleeping differently! He no longer has all those medications swimming in his blood stream and interacting!
We don’t know what his natural sleep patterns are, because they’ve been mediated for so many years. So unless he feels tired, the short sleep is probably fine. And he’ll probably find some kind of equilibrium as his body adjusts to the change in medication. See, I didn’t consider that our annual exam, when he dropped a medication, is pretty close to the time change. And he went down from a whole pill to a half pretty close to the spring change. It all makes sense, timing-wise.
I’ll still miss him in the bed when I’m still asleep and he’s awake, but I’m not going to be worried about it anymore. It’s all part of finding his new normal.