Pain and insomnia

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Hey everyone. Been a hot minute since I’ve been on this forum, how is everyone doing? I am currently sleep deprived and suffering through yet another night of insomnia accompanied with extreme nerve pain in my legs. Nothing has been helping me unfortunately. I came back on here because I do live alone (other than the company of my little black cat whom I love) and sometimes these rougher patches can get the best of me. Does anybody else go through horrible pain almost every single day and also suffer from insomnia? The medications and treatments I am on do not seem to be helping. Is there anything that you have found to be helpful?

Thanks guys, I guess I just need some support and the opportunity to chat with others who understand what I am going through. None of my family seems to understand just how horrible fibromyalgia really is, and obviously I would never wish it upon them…but living with it all alone and not having friends that also have the same auto immune disease becomes pretty isolating after a while…Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Love to you all. :heavy_heart_exclamation:

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I had the insomnia last night badly, so can relate

Do you take a sleep aid, i do but occasionally it just fails, helps most nights

If there is a strong storm close by, i sleep less…

I get some help from meds , but also alternative things

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I do take a sleep aid, but like you, sometimes it works and sometimes It does not. The barometric temperature is frequently changing, I can literally feel when a storm is coming through. I hadn’t really thought of that but that might have something to do with worse insomnia lately. Does anything help you when this happens?

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Acupressure mat helps, and my breathing will feel shallow in a low pressure and the microcurrent unit , has me breathing better very quickly… i have had this disease since i was a child, so i have a pretty full toolbox for fibro…

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Hi Dodi,
I wish I coud help with something to ease symptoms, but I am still looking as well. I can’t take the doctor’s painkillers and they don’t seem interested now anyway. I live with my husband, have just moved somewhere new which I hate so we are looking to move again-more stress. No one in my family understand what I go through each day. I would say they don’t care, but I think they just do not know what it is like. The only person who has some idea is my husband and he doesn’t understand 100%, but he does try.

I do not sleep well at all, and constantly feel tired most of the day, and now on top of everything with fibro my eyes have decided to get worse. I had them checked a few weeks ago and all ok, but now they are very dry and stinging and sore. I have dry eyes anyway, so have eye drops, but the soreness is bad, makes me want to rub them but try not to.

I do understand just what you are going through, and really wish I could help. Stay strong and cuddle your little black cat-wish I had one, I love cats.

Wishing you a reasonable sunday. SueT.

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Hi Dodi,
I too suffer from what I call Painsomnia. I’m almost afraid to try and sleep because I know how much pain I will be in when I try to go to bed or wake up in during the night. This last month I had an increase in pain in my legs that made it even worse. One thing I tried recently that has been a godsend is a Magnesium Lotion by Life-flo( I bought it on Amazon for about $11 and it smells like vanilla!). You just take a small amount and rub it in the area that hurts. I swear, literally 2 minutes later my pain had nearly disappeared. I literally cried I was so surprised because NOTHING has ever helped like this… not so directly and quickly. I’ve tried Loidocaine patches, Tens units and they help a little but this has been a game changer for me. This is recent too… just in the last week and I’ve been dealing with Fibro since 2012. I actually haven’t taken any Ibuprofen in 4 days now and I have literally taken 600mg twice a day at least for over 25 years! I hope maybe this will help you too. At least it wouldn’t be expensive to try. It was recommended to me by another Fibro site. I had tried the Magnesium oil but it made me feel itchy and I didn’t know you needed to put it where you hurt…I thought you just needed to absorb it, so I wasn’t doing right. I hope you get some better sleep soon.

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Oh SueT, I am so sorry to hear about your current circumstances. Stress is one of the worst instigators for fibromyalgia. I pray that you move to a better place soon, and I hope that you have people that can help you move. I had to hire movers and thankfully my family helped where they could when I last moved - I swear it nearly killed me and I was laid up for weeks with boxes still packed.
I am glad your husband tries to understand. Having people that at least make an effort can make all the difference in the world. My family doesn’t understand my limitations and pains at times either, or I think they get sick of hearing me when I do say I just want to cry because I am hurting so badly. It makes me withdraw even more. Very thankful for forums like this where I can listen and share with others who truly understand.
I certainly understand having issues with eyes as well, mine used to become extremely red and hurt horribly and I also wanted to rub them all day. Eventually my optometrist put plugs into my tear ducts to help them lubricate with more tears - I does make a huge difference! I still use eye drops and notice that my eyes are worse on bad flare up days, but thankfully not nearly as bad as they once were. I hope that is something could help you as well.
My cat is currently cuddled up on my lap while I type away. I couldn’t ask for a sweeter boy. I think rescues are commonly the best companions. Maybe after you move you could look at getting a cat too? Most are low maintenance and want to cuddle, I swear Phoenix knows when I am having a terrible pain day and stays with me through it.
Wishing you a healing day with low stress.

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Thank you so much for your recommendation, I will absolutely give this a try! I suppose that would make a lot of sense because magnesium is a natural muscle relaxant, I much prefer taking something like that as opposed to more ibuprofen. I hate taking any medications really but when the pain is horrendous it becomes difficult. Do you find that it helps with joint pain as well?

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I would say yes it helps with the joints. In that it helps the soft tissue and muscle be pain free for me within a few minutes in most spots. Some of the more painful places I have to reapply a little more often(every couple hours) but it still helps.

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As you are implying I find it helps to see if it is the joints or actually the tendons. My suspicion is that joints would be rheumatic/arthritic, whilst if we have ‘just’ fibro that’d be the tendons: like “polyinsertionstendomyopathy” my 2nd rheum. here in Germany preferred to specify fibro as, which I agree with in that I had a lot of and partly still have ‘pain of the muscles and esp. of the insertions of the tendons’, but I don’t agree with in that these aren’t my main problems at all.

For my tendons I use an arnica complex cream (probably includes magnesium) and twist-stretching, get them regularly intensely treated with acupressure, so that there are continual slight improvements as well.

I did continue to have sleep problems (having to get up 5-9x a night and also needing a lot of sleep) after I’d got rid of all the night pains tho, and have only managed to improve that by experimenting with the amino acid supps I’ve discovered, esp. GABA. After increasing it now, my sleep seems to be getting more effective: less dozing, more deep sleep, less sleep, feeling awake earlier and not so dead tired at 7pm.

Have you tried Epsom salt baths (magnesium sulfate)? (I haven’t, but take capsules of magnesium malate and glycinate in the evenings to add to the GABA, passionflower, and now glutamine and theanine).

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Hi Dodi,
Think we will be stuck here for a while as the two places we would like to move to, we have to wait till someone moves out. No, no one to help us move, which is why I am dreading it, we did it all ourselves the last time and just had movers to load/unload the truck.
My family just don’t seem to care, I only have a sister and a brother left now, and they are no help at all. My sister just laughs at me if I say my back is bad so I don’t bother any more, and my brother is usually not in touch.
I had my eyes checked about 6 weeks ago and everything was good, then they started hurting a week or so after that. If they don’t clear up soon will go back there. Very hard to get a doctor’s appointment these days, you could be waiting for 12 weeks or so.
I would dearly love to have a cat, but every place we have lived in has a ‘no pets’ policy. We rent so
can’t do anything about it-but I can dream. I like your name for your cat, Phoenix is lovely.
Wishing you a healing day as well and stress can go away.
SueT.

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Passiflora / Passionflower

Wow, I don’t believe it, passiflora incarnata has only ever been mentioned once before me on this forum (by @dee_B, 2013), altho I think most of us suffer from sleep problems. It was actually the first substance suggested to me for sleep, by my first psychiatrist. It didn’t help when I tried it first, but now I’ve been taking it with GABA and (at first) glutamic acid again since starting with GABA April 15th and getting lots of improvements.

OK, I’m putting a focus on it now, as it seems that removing magnesium glycinate and doubling passiflora from 2x289mg to 4x has greatly improved my sleep depth, intensity, stints, breaks & effectiveness. Removing magnesium malate now too, I want to see how much higher I might dose the passiflora, as 4x is the max. it says on the lable.

Dosage varies greatly from 90 to 900mg per dose, no real recommendations, however with the 4 capsules I'm taking and recommended on my lable I'm already at 1,156mg

Webmd: Passion flower extract products typically provide 250-900 mg per dose. But there isn’t enough reliable information to know what an appropriate dose of passion flower might be.

Verywellmind: 500 mg of passiflora incarnata 90 minutes prior to surgery

drugs: 90mg or 500mg

While I’m at it, this study from 2010/2011 says it seems good for “anxiety or nervousness, Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), symptoms of opiate withdrawal, insomnia, neuralgia, convulsion, spasmodic asthma, ADHD, palpitations, cardiac rhythm abnormalities, hypertension, sexual dysfunction and menopause”
and seems to work via modulation of the GABA system including affinity to GABA(A) and GABA(B) receptors, and effects on GABA uptake. In rats at least. (grrr :rat: I love them.)

Also another study from 2011/2012 says it improves “PTZ-induced seizures, and ameliorates its associated post-ictal depression”.

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Putting some on the bottom of your feet as well is supposed to help (in addition to the pain site, or only there if you get a lot of itching with it). Learning this factor (from someone working in a local business that sells magnesium spray and she has fibro too- small world) was a Godsend- I can’t often use it on the rest of my skin due to the itching, but it’s fine on the soles of my feet.

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Hi Dodi!

My sleep problems have mostly been because of joint pain. I´ve been tested for every type of joint condition under the sun. The only explanation that remais is the fibro.

What has helped me a lot has been to change the way I sleep. I recently bought a memory foam pillowtop for my bed (even though my matress already had a memory foam top, I felt the pressure from my body on my joints when going to sleep) and I started using a body-pillow. It´s great for repositioning you arms and legs so that your joints are supported on a soft pillowy surface. You can find both the pillowtop and the body-pillow on amazon and they´re not that expensive.

Another great solution I’ve just recently tried was lymphatic drainage massage. It helps so so much with the joint pain but it does make me want to get up at night to go to the bathroom more than before, so you’d have to weigh the benifit on that front.

Hope I helped even if just by showing you you’re not alone.
Wishing you better sleep.

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