This question is for the TSM folks that have been doing it for months with improvement or who have called cured........

How bad were your sleep patterns to begin with, and if they improved, how long did it take?

Did it get better with AF days or worse?

Lastly, if your sleep improved, did you see any change in your memory?????

Thanks in advance!

I am also very curious about this!

My sleep pattern before TSM was fall asleep fast or most of the time pass out/blackout around 9:30. Then wide awake from 1 or 2 o'clock till 4. I usually turned on the tv and hoped to fall back asleep during this period. I always thought I was waking up because the alcohol was leaving my body? Then a groggy hangover up and at em for work at 6:30. If I was fortunate enough to sleep through the night it was because I really got hammered the night before. For decades it was the only life I knew. Now I sleep like a baby and if I do wake up in the middle of the night, I go right back to sleep. I noticed the ability to sleep better after a few months of starting TSM. The af days are helping me sleep better.

I'm not cured but when I do go off of drinking for a week or two I sleep way better as alcohol disrupts my sleep. I also find that alcohol is like a sleep aid to get you to sleep and I get dependent on it so the first couple of days that I do not drink I have the worst time trying to get to sleep.

I used to say that one good thing about a binge was that I got two good nights' sleep out of the deal. The first was really passing out and the second was collapse after a day of harrowing hangover, but at least it was sleep. When you're lying there staring at the ceiling at 4:00 AM, any sleep at all sounds good.

My sleep baseline is disrupted and always has been. That hasn't changed. However, a year into my cure, it's clear that the alcohol was actually making things worse in the long term. Short-term fixes aren't inherently bad -- whatever gets you through the night is all right. Unfortunately, alcohol has too many negative effects to be useful as a sleep aid. It disrupts deep sleep patterns and ends up making everything harder.

The sleep thing was a transition, but it did work out. I had some old 10mg valium tablets and took half of one maybe once every week. This allowed me to rest, which helped me cope with the low-sleep nights.

I'm not sure what my point is. I guess it's that we can recover from whatever part of the sleep pain was actually from the alcohol, which then helps with not "needing" alcohol to sleep.

Hey, while reviewing old threads, I found something I wrote about a month after being cured:



I dubbed the cure a win, but apparently I was pretty grumpy about the insomnia at the time. If it gives you any hope, these days I'm sleeping decently and am reasonably functional. I don't even remember it as being that bad, although apparently it was.

Thanks melissa and that is why it is so good to track drinks, side effects etc so you can look back and see how it really was. Our alcoholic minds seem to forget how bad some things were. I think that is why so many go back to drinking after staying sober for so much time on traditional methods as they think they were NEVER that bad and can now drink like a normal person. Which of course we are proving that it can be done on TSM.