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Sleep and fatigue

Asleep by nine, wrecked by eleven the next morning

Started 6 September 2025 · 8 replies · 344 hearts · read 3.9k times

NorahDerry, NI · 6 September 2025
10 months ago

Derry. Nights, then days, then nights, and I have been a sleep circle regular since last year so most of you know the shape of my week.

This is a new thing though and I cannot work it out. Since about July I have been sleeping more and feeling worse. Nine hours on my days off. Asleep on the settee by nine on a night I am not working, out cold, and then awake at seven feeling as if I have been assembled from spare parts. By eleven in the morning I am ready to go back.

It is not the old shift tiredness. I know that one intimately and it has a different flavour — that one is wired and sore-eyed and improves with coffee. This is heavy. Coffee does nothing to it. It is like the tiredness I had with flu in 2019, minus the flu.

Things I have already thought of, so nobody has to say them: yes I am drinking enough now, no I was not in July. Yes I have had bloods done, they are being repeated in October because one thing was borderline. No, I am not new to this — nineteen months in and my dose has not changed since March.

What I actually want to know is whether more sleep making things worse is a known thing to anybody, or whether I have invented a syndrome out of a bad summer.

115

KikiFacilitatorGlasgow, UK
#1

Norah, you have not invented it, and I want to be careful about how I say why, because I hold this circle and it would be easy to give you a tidy answer that is not mine to give.

What is very well described — in shift workers especially — is that long unbroken sleep at the wrong end of a fortnight does not repay the debt in the way the arithmetic suggests it should. People sleep nine hours and wake unrefreshed and conclude something is wrong with the sleep, when what is wrong is often the pattern around it. That is not a diagnosis of you. It is the thing this circle sees most.

The bit I would not want lost in the discussion: you have a borderline result being repeated in October. That is the thread to keep hold of. Heavy, flu-shaped tiredness that coffee does not touch, going on for two months, with a borderline blood result, is a conversation to keep having with your GP rather than a puzzle to solve in here. We can keep you company while it gets sorted.

47me too 12

OssianTromsø, NO
#2

Tromsø, and dark winters do not help. What you describe as heavy — assembled from spare parts is a very good phrase — is exactly my January and February, every year, and it is worse now than before I started, which I have raised twice.

My doctor’s view was that the medicine was probably not the cause but was unlikely to be helping, which is the most honest thing anybody said to me all year.

36me too 9

HattieExeter, UK
#3

Chronic fatigue plus this, careful pacing, and I want to offer one distinction that took me eight years to learn.

Sleepiness and fatigue are not the same thing and they respond to opposite treatments. Sleepiness gets better with sleep. Fatigue often gets worse with more sleep and better with a small, regular, absolutely unambitious amount of activity spread through the day.

Nine hours making you worse is a very familiar sentence in the circles I sit in. It is not proof of anything. It is a clue about which of the two you are dealing with.

58me too 15

SunnivaBodø, NO
#4

Bodø, Arctic circle, polar night is hard on everything. The one thing that changed my winter was getting up at the same time regardless — including on days off, including after a bad night — which I resisted for two years because the lie-in felt like the only thing keeping me going.

It was not keeping me going. It was moving the problem to Wednesday.

44me too 11

LinneaTurku, FI
#5

Turku. Finnish winters, sauna, steady progress. Mine was iron in the end, found on a repeat test after a borderline one, so I would say: chase the October appointment rather than waiting to be called.

Not saying yours is that. Saying that borderline results get repeated and then get forgotten by everyone including the patient.

39me too 7

Ollie OPeterhead, UK
#6

Peterhead, offshore, three weeks on. My fatigue was worst in the fortnight after each step up and then lifted. Nineteen months in with no change since March does not fit that pattern at all, which is worth noting — you have ruled something out that most people cannot.

27me too 4

DotFalmouth, UK
#7

Terrible sleeper, Falmouth. The only thing that ever helped my heaviness was going outside within about half an hour of waking, even in the rain, even for four minutes. My sister-in-law is a nurse and told me to do it and I ignored her for a year.

Does nothing for the cause. Does something for the eleven o’clock slump.

41me too 10

NorahDerry, NI
#8

Hattie, that distinction has reorganised my whole month. Sleepiness versus fatigue. I have been treating this with the remedy for the other thing since July.

October appointment already rung about and moved to the twenty-sixth of September. Getting up at the same time on days off, which I hate on principle. Four minutes outside.

And Kiki, thank you for not tidying it up. I would have taken a neat answer and stopped chasing the blood test.

52me too 8

Facilitator note — Kiki

Facilitator note — Kiki. I hold sleep-and-fatigue and I want to flag the thing this thread does well, because it is a hard balance and the room found it without me.

Norah got eight replies. Seven of them were about patterns and habits, which is what a peer circle is genuinely good for. None of them replaced the appointment. One member noticed that a borderline result was sitting there waiting to be forgotten and said so, and Norah moved it forward a month.

Tiredness is the symptom this community is worst at taking seriously, because everyone has it and everyone is used to it. Being tired for two months in a way that is new to you is worth somebody clinical looking at, however ordinary it feels from the inside.

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