Insomnia

[bumpy737]

How do you cope with insomnia? I don’t mean taking prescribed pills which can cause addiction, but my roster is sometimes 7 days of flying with a night flight in the middle followed by early flight the day after. I go to sleep after the night duty with having trouble to fall asleep then in the evening. I tried 10mg melatonin capsules and it helped a little. Do you have some other tips or negative experience with melatonin?

[750XL]

Never did find a solution, best I could do was practise good sleep hygiene

No naps through the day
No caffeine 8 hours before bed
No long lie ins
No food later than 3 hours before bed
Exercise at least once a day
Avoid phone, laptop, tablet etc in bed.

[Denti]

I did realize how much my sleeping patterns were damaged when i was forced to take three months off work. After about a month i was able to sleep through the night for the first time in years. Thereafter i did try the sleep hygiene thing, although it was rather about having a fixed pattern of behaviour in the hours before sleep, assuring i was not interrupted by outside influences (difficult with a family) and calling in fatigue for every unhealthy roster pairing.

Still suffered some sleep problems though, which kinda cured itself by joining a carrier with a fixed roster pattern, five earlies (easy for me as a morning person), three off, five late (hard for me) and four off, rinse repeat. No night flights. To have a few days to shift my sleeping pattern between blocks really helped, as well as being in either early or late mode for a whole block of duties. Exercise, if at all possible outside, reducing my alcohol intake as well as trying not to get stressed about stuff i have no influence over seems to help.

[HolyMoley]

trying not to get stressed about stuff i have no influence over seems to help.

This is the key to pretty much all non-medical approaches to insomnia (Dr Guy Meadows has a programme that tackles this). The point is that the very act of being concerned about how much sleep you are getting and then trying to do everything you can to enable more sleep are the very things that prevent you sleeping (of course once all the environmental/caffeine/alcohol/exercise factors have been mitigated). Some way of distracting the mind can be useful, maybe some sort of simple approach along the lines of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy can also help.

[anchorhold]

I think what 750XL has suggested us a good starting point, but it is really about working out what works for you. Also some background reading on sleep might help you devise a plan, 24 Hour Society by Dr Matin Moore-Ede I seem to remember was a good book.

THE UK HSE has some sensible guidelines on sleep hygiene and alertness as follows:

Hints and tips for shift-workers