Looking for insomnia help. My 17-year-old daughter has always had sleep issues, but it has gotten worse over the last few months. Although it seems she is in Defense Mode less and has been going on daily 1-hour walks for the last couple of weeks that hasn't helped her sleep. She struggles to fall asleep and stay asleep. She currently tends to sleep for an hour during the night and then sleep from roughly 8 am-1 pm. This has been very frustrating to her and thwarts her attempts to establish healthier habits, etc. Over the years she has seen a sleep psychologist, had a home sleep study, tried melatonin, and been prescribed various medications which either caused new issues, didn't work, or stopped working. The only sleep issue she was diagnosed with was "delayed sleep onset." We've tried addressing sleep behaviors, bright screens, etc. I still think she could improve her sleep behaviors and environment, but she balks and claims further changes won't help. Unfortunately, she dislikes meditation and breathing exercises, which help me a great deal. We have recently started attempting to homeschool so have the flexibility to try different schedules. Since she often can't sleep at all during the night, a couple of times she tried to reset her sleep schedule by staying up until the next night, but she never made it. The best success we had was when we just started pushing her sleep schedule forward through the day by 1-2 hours each day (go to bed at 8 am, then 10 am, then noon, etc.). It was confusing and hard to work around her appointments but during that time she had no issues falling asleep and usually stayed asleep (but was only sleeping about 7 hrs). However, as soon as she reached a normal bedtime again, her sleep issues reappeared. Any ideas?

Posted by cate at 2022-06-03 20:44:13 UTC