How to sleep when the sun goes down

Or: How I turned my narcoleptic self into a flaming hot, sleepless mess for 2025

NOTE: I’m posting this about two weeks after the fact. If you read these newsletters you’ll know that I was going to stop posting my blogs here in favour of Substack. But it seems that’s no good for my actual site so I’ll continue posting here and you’ll continue receiving the updates until you unsubscribe 🙂

Six nights. At the point of writing this, just the last six nights – out of a year’s worth of sleep – have been normal.

It’s been more than a month since I posted about how my sleep went to the shitter, and since I received so much feedback about it I decided to do a follow-up post.

There have been developments. I figured out what was wrong. And frankly, it was both extremely simple and complicated all at once.

I’m not really one for public deep-dives into personal health issues but – just like other people talking about their experiences helped me figure out what was going on (thanks Reddit!) – there might be something here that can help someone.

If you’re not into this sort of thing, I totally get it. Now that I have my brain back, regular programming can and will resume from next week. See you then.

And if you are interested but don’t need the detail here’s the TLDR version: Lions mane and ashwagandha fucked me up, I have narcolepsy, and I was taking all my other supplements wrong.

There. That’s it. You can go.

However, I would suggest you keep reading if you’re:

A peri/menopausal woman with sleep problems (even if you’re on HRT)
Have any type of narcolepsy (there are two: Type 1 and Type 2; I have Type 2) or other ‘weird sleep stuff’)
Don’t eat red meat or drink milk
Have insomnia or restless leg syndrome
Or if you like fucking around with supplements.

And definitely read it if you’re like me and all of the above applies to you. (Sorry for you.)

So. Onward with the revelations…

A light-bulb moment…

After I’d posted Little Fairies Proele Mah Hairie, I thought I finally had a solution to what was going on. I’d managed to quell the bulk of my anxiety (thanks 5-HTP) and because of that some nights felt better than others.

Unfortunately – or fortunately, it turns out – things got pretty bad again to the point that I had to go see a neuropsychologist.

She put me on a sleep regime that seemed to start working, but the problem I was having with my brain being ‘front-loaded’ and unable to go into or stay in the sleepy space sort of remained.

The anxiety was 90% better – it was no longer outright panic – but it was still there, needing to be managed, and the twitching and muscle stretching kept me awake even if my brain was giving me the night off.

At our second meeting, my doc asked me a little more about the supplements I was taking and we chatted through some stuff I should’ve known about but didn’t, some stuff I’d forgotten, and then the matter of drug interactions.

I thought drug interactions might be something to consider because I’d noticed that when I started the progesterone part of my HRT cycle my sleep would get worse. My gynae thought this was ridiculous, my well woman doctor thought it unlikely. Didn’t really matter what they thought since I was living it.

Anyway, so then I thought, hm, what other supplements am I taking that are supposed to work on the brain that might be interacting with the progesterone that also works on the brain…

Ashwagandha and lion’s mane

I started taking ashwagandha about a year ago because it was supposed to help with cognitive stuff and stress and sleep and and and … and then I started taking a combo of ashwagandha and lion’s mane about six months ago.

I won’t bore you with more details, but what I didn’t do when I started taking the supplements was consider that:

You’re not supposed to take these ancient (unregulated) medicines in what amounts to industrial doses for extreme lengths of time compared to how they would’ve been administered 3 000 years ago when they were first used,
All the ‘ashwagandha is great’ studies don’t extend past three months, and:
Not everyone reacts to these medications the way they’re generally reacted to.

After not even the deepest of dives I found people talking about some adverse reactions to ashwagandha like: it can be a major stressor and cause of restlessness and emotional blunting for some people (might seem contradictory, but this was my experience); and others describing how lion’s mane had stripped them of sleep (also my experience), among other things.

This guy pretty much sums my experience up in the first ten minutes of his interview. He says something like: ‘I went from eight hours to five hours to three hours to one hour … it was as if someone had injected caffeine into my brain.’

That’s exactly how it was for me. He also talks about how lion’s mane just punched through sleeping pills (also my experience) and how he started getting the twitches (also me).

So I stopped this combo supplement and within 48 hours, my relentless anxiety had all but vanished and my sleep was back.

It’s kinda embarrassing that I sort of got myself into this pickle, especially because I’ve never trusted a mushroom (apart from the tame ones and psilocybin), but I didn’t fully get that if one’s brain is wired differently for sleep it will respond quite dramatically to anything that’s supposed to affect sleep.

And before I continue, let me just confirm: I’m not saying, ‘ashwagandha and lion’s mane bad’; I’m just saying, it’s not for everyone and it wasn’t for me. Maybe it’s not for you either.

Maybe don’t take it for years.

Anyway.

Weird sleep stuff and narcolepsy

Let me just quickly touch on narcolepsy for all my undiagnosed narco friendies out there who just think they’re a little weird or funny with sleep stuff.

If the term ‘sleep attack’ is something you feel in your eyeballs, if you are falling asleep all over the place – with (Type 1) or without (Type 2) cataplexy (like in the movies where someone falls over) – if you close your eyes and go straight into REM, if you hear or see weird shit as you’re falling asleep, you should get that looked at.

Narcolepsy isn’t a ‘funny sleep disease’ (although I still feel the humour in it), it’s not something you have to push through. It’s a neurological disorder that there is support for. Here are some links to consider:

And then book a session with a neuropsychologist or a neuropsychiatrist in your area that specialises in sleep disorders.

My symptoms have really eased up as I’ve gotten older, but I still get sleep attacks and brain fog and the infernal daytime drowsiness. I’ll be dealing with this with my neuro doc next week.

Restless leg and other strange twitches

Restless leg isn’t just ‘that strange need to move your legs’. It’s also the weird combo of a full voluntary stretch in your legs and body that you can’t not do. Unless you’ve had really bad RLS this won’t make any sense to you.

At the height of it for me, I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t lie still for more than a few dozen seconds at a time before I had to stretch my body out.

It’s theorised that RLS is linked to low iron – ferritin – in the brain. But here’s what you might not know: you don’t have to be anaemic to have a low iron count. I don’t know how this works but there you go.

So on the surface, for example, my blood looks fine and I no longer suffer anaemic symptoms – heart palps, fatigue etc – but full blood works on my iron revealed critically low ferritin. Which means, in my case, really fucking unbearable restless leg/body.

To counter this I need much more intense iron supplementation (I don’t eat meat) and for some people this can mean an iron infusion or transfusion. I’m not really sure what the difference is except that it’s expensive and something I hope I don’t have to learn about.

And, by the way, I had been taking iron, just not in the right way: In the morning on an empty stomach with vitamin C. You can’t take it with calcium or magnesium, you can’t take it with food. I had been doing all of that, hence increasingly bad RLS.

Now that I’m taking my iron properly, my RLS is easing right up.

If iron supplementation still doesn’t work for you, if it isn’t enough, there are medications that can help (something called gabapentin), but you’ll have to speak to a neurologist who specialises in RLS.

Because, honestly, unless you have a GP who is knowledgeable about this they’re not going to know what the fuck to do with you.

And then the twitches…

Vitamin Bs … what the fuck was I thinking?

Short answer? I wasn’t. I went vegetarian in 1998, pescatarian somewhere around 2011. I don’t eat red meat, and since I stopped drinking coffee in the shape of flat whites, don’t really drink milk anymore. Or, at least, not enough milk.

What I didn’t realise – not since 1998 – is that if you don’t eat red meat or drink lots of milk or eat lots of cheese, you must supplement with Vit B. Must. It’s not an optional extra. It’s not a nice-to-have. It’s critical. And you have to get the good stuff. There are shit products out there.

I was taking my Bs only to have my fingers start tingling and feet burning again. Not to mention the terrible twitches all over my skin. (Can you cope with what a ball of fun I’ve been the last few months?! Tom’s had just the most wonderful time…)

Best I’ve found so far is Neurobion – something I was taking and then for some reason just thought: Nah, fuck it. Why use the best product on the market when I can take some new fandangled nonsense?

So now that I’m back on the Neurobion (and off the lion’s mane), the twitches have stopped, my finger tips aren’t tingling anymore and my feet don’t feel like exploded cabbages.

Which brings me to that most excellent of supplementation…

HRT: Progesterone and estrogen

I am so sick of hearing menopause doctors say shit like: As a woman in perimenopause, sleep is the most important thing for your physical and mental health.

Like, I know bitch, but I can’t sleep. If you’re the same – and assuming you’re not taking weird-ass supplements that are cooking your brain and assuming you don’t have weird sleep shit like narcolepsy or sleep apnea – here are some things you must, must, must consider:

If you’re perimenopausal and you can’t sleep: Get on HRT.
If you’re on HRT and still can’t sleep:
1. Are you still drinking alcohol and/or caffeine? Because, I’m sorry to say this, but you will have to choose. Alcohol or sleep, caffeine or sleep.
2. Check and change your HRT if you need to. In my case, the patches weren’t as good a transdermal medium as the gel and I simply need more estrogen than other women. I know some gynaes are still hesitant to prescribe more than the minimum dose, but every body is different and you will need to ‘experiment’ to see what works for you. I’m a three-pump gal. Not two-and-a-half, not two. Three. Anything less and my joints start aching, my ears start itching and my sleep goes to shit. Find what works for you, not your friend, not your gynae.
3. Take sleep routines seriously. They really work.

So there you have it

How I turned myself into a flaming hot, sleepless mess for 2025. On the upside, I did learn a lot and have a firmer handle on the narcolepsy thing. Makes it, I don’t know, sort of … less embarrassing and stupid-feeling?

Anyway.

That’s the last I’ll post about it. I hope that whoever needs to know any part of this information finds it. Especially if you’re a narcoleptic enjoying the sweet hell-fire transition that is perimenopause.

Love and light,
t