Sleep cycles.
Missy at Living with Chronic Pain and Depression talks about messed-up sleep cycles:
Due to pain I have a difficult time sleeping at night. By the time I manage to do so, it is usually early morning (4 to 6 AM). I may sleep 4 to 6 hours, sometimes less. This goes on for a few days until my body reaches pure exhaustion from lack of sleep and I end up sleeping 12 to 16 hours which means I wake up somewhere around 4PM to 8PM. Now I'm wide awake and there is no way I will sleep at night. This cycle of sleep disturbances can be triggered very easily. One single night awake due to pain, can take me 2 to 3 weeks to get back to sleeping at night. Each additional day/night of inability to sleep or stay asleep only makes it take longer to get back to normal, hence the 2 to 3 weeks.
Can I ever relate to this. My sleep cycle is so fragile, any little disturbance and it's out of whack for weeks. Sometimes it's pain that keeps me up, just like Missy says, sometimes worry, and sometimes it's CFIDS itself that screws up my sleep cycle.
