Breathing Deeply: My Life With Cystic Fibrosis

I slept quite a bit this weekend. I think I must have been getting caught up after being so wound up about my work week. Brad and I were talking about the difference between how we process things mentally and how that affects our sleep. For Brad he is able to "log off" in his brain at night and pretty much shut down all his thoughts in order to sleep. He said he waked up each morning with a fresh slate that is relatively untouched by the previous day. This is NOT the case with me. My brain is constantly processing things. There are nights when I wish I did have an "off" button. Instead, my thoughts are like a movie that never ends. I can put it on "pause" for long enough to get some sleep, but even in my sleep I'm still thinking about things. When I wake up in the morning, I pick up right where I left of the night before, still thinking about a dozen things at one.

There was a time when my thoughts throughout the night were unordered and repetitive. I would get a single phrase stuck in my head and it would repeat itself over and over ad infinitum ad nauseum. Once I was diagnosed with obsessive/compulsive disorder, I was finally able to get a handle on that thanks to medication. There are times when I still find myself stuck with a repeating phrase or thought, but it isn't nearly as frequently as it used to be.

Sleep is still tricky though. I try to go to bed at the same time each night, but I almost always feel tired well into the next morning. Today hasn't been so bad, although I coughed a lot first thing when I started moving around. I still have a sinus headache too, but that's because of this icky dry weather. It's been so dry that I've shocked myself on every doorknob I've touched at work. Ouch!