The past couple of days I have been experiencing something that I remember from the bad old days when my depression began, and it's why I believed for a while that my problem was SAD. Now that it's going on again, only just into September, it's frightening me. I've had to really do some brain work not to get into a panic.

Simply this. I start getting tired earlier than usual, and I wake up early. I usually go to bed at 10:30 or 11, but the past couple of days I've been really groggy at 9. I'm waking up at 4 a.m. and having a lot of difficulty getting back to sleep. Accompanying these problems, over time, I usually find that I start getting a brain fog, a lot of anxiety, and all the depressive symptoms generally get worse. It would appear to be my body clock going askew, and having knock-on effects.

Last summer I stopped doing light therapy because after the drug withdrawal it was sending my cortisol too high. I had this problem and tried going to bed when I felt tired. I quickly found that I would just get tired an hour or two earlier than that the next day, and wake earlier still. However, the problem then largely went away, due to (I thought) starting the Paleo diet and taking a good variety of supplements. The depression obviously isn't purely down to body clock problems, but it's certainly worse when they are a feature.

I remember my sleep becoming more disturbed again after amalgam removal mid-June this year. After two months of chelation my other removal-induced symptoms seemed to disappear, but not this one. I don't know why it seems to have suddenly got worse these past few days. Maybe because we haven't seen much sun, and it's setting earlier? Maybe because my diet hasn't been clean for the past week and a half? I just don't know. I do know that I'm feeling rough and it's twice as bad when the sun sets.

I'm putting my diet right today, will give my body a few days to get things out of my system. Then I will start chelating again. It's hard to deal with the fear factor here though. I know how this tends to get worse as winter approaches. My worst months aren't usually even until February and March, so this isn't something I want to be pulling me down in September.

Has anyone else here had body clock problems that they think may be related to mercury? I seem to remember reading that mercury can interfere with melatonin production.

I suppose it's also possible that my body is dumping some mercury? It's been about 2 1/2 weeks since my last chelation round, and 2 1/2 months post-removal. I actually stopped taking Algin while I wasn't chelating but I've started it again in hopes that it will help.

Hello LL:

Absolutely, yes. Whether it is the mercury or its resultant effect on the thyroid/adrenals, I have noticed changes in sleep patterns. Don't let it get you down - I think it is normal for mercury poisoned people to experience.

I found melatonin to be very helpful for a long time - 3mg at night, just before bed. That helped me sleep all the way through for quite some time. But, later, I got into a pattern where I would wake up and at 2 or 3 and then fall back asleep - usually quite easy to do. Occasionally, not.

Eventually this should get better for you.

TW

Dear Linda since becoming ill, my body clock is all over the place and no matter how tired during the day, I can force myself to stay awake, makes no difference. I think you just have to listen to your body for now and sleep when it tells you to. Tracy P.S. Remember sleep is a great healer of body and mind, maybe at present we underestimate how much we need to recover.

Wow, thanks to you both. I waged a full war against this for a year and a half with light therapy. I'd do hours of it in the evening, hoping to switch my body clock back so that my child-free evening hours wouldn't be wasted, and I wouldn't wake up feeling like my head had been getting hammered all night. Certainly I noticed that when this problem wasn't as bad, I felt better all round.

It isn't the sleep problems themselves so much that worry me, it's the effect this seems to have on the depression. Particularly the brain fog. I can see myself not being able to write much here apart from "bleh" in a few months' time. Might be delightful for some of the people I've been debating with, but not for me.

Telling me it will get better in time is a big consolation. I really want to start chelating again but I'm having trouble getting my diet back on track first. As soon as I start having sugar, it's hard to stop because I go through a nasty withdrawal.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I might see improvements all round in a few weeks. My daughter will go to full-time school and I will be doing a course 2 days a week that might lead to a job. It will be interesting to see how much those things alone help me.

In the meantime, zzzzz. I've been dozing for an hour while my duaghter's been playing with Play-Doh. Thank goodness for Play-Doh LOL.

Linda.

Light therapy at night? Why do that? That may be messing you up. try doing it in the morning. Do you drink cofee, tea, or soda or anything else that has caffeine? If you fall asleep at 9 pm and wake up at 4 am, then don't try to go back to sleep, but instead try to stay up to at least 10 pm the next night, then 11 pm the following night until you get you sleep patterns the way you want them. It might mean going a night or two of less sleep than normal to straighten out the pattern.

For years i would lie there exhausted unable to shut off,and in the last 2 yrs it got worse. It is an adrenal prob for me because low dose of H.C sends me to sleep, good quality sleep. i do get the odd night but mainly i sleep like a baby.
If my heart is racing and i feel hyper at night i take half tsp hymalayan sea salt ,it works well.

Thanks guys. I find this problem difficult to explain. I know that early morning waking is often associated with depression; it's just that it more or less went away, but is back now. It's hard to know what conclusions to come to.

I do know that it isn't a problem of not being able to shut off. My doc once suggested this. Before the depression sleep was never a problem for me. Then I found myself waking at 3 a.m. (after daylight savings was over) and being wide awake. It wasn't anything to do with my mindset, it was my body waking itself up for the day, hours too early.

Thanks for the advice JNY but I did say in my post that I haven't done light therapy since I came off my antidepressant; the bright light sends me into adrenal overload. It is about a year and a half since I stopped that. But I actually did find that I got some benefit from light in the evening, 7 p.m. being the optimum time for me. Evening light can help if you get sleepy and wake up too early; this is sometimes called advanced circadian rhythm disorder. Most people who have SAD have the opposite problem, not being able to sleep and not being able to get up when they need to, which is why morning light helps them.

I don't eat or drink anything with caffeine. Also, one of the first things I used to try was getting up at 3 or 4 am when my body wanted. I found that I would be OK for a few hours and then get that hammered feeling again, which would last all day and be worse because I'd missed out on some sleep. For me it seems to work better to try to get back to sleep or, failing that, just to lie there and try to rest.

Playing with all these things does not help me. What I'm wondering is if getting my amalgams out has upset the balance again, because I didn't have these problems to much of a degree for a whole year, until I did that. Mind you, it's been a dismal summer here, and it's possible I'm still being affected by levels of light. This seems to have been the case for 3 years now. If events coming in the next several weeks help lift the depression then it will be interesting to see how my sleep pattern is affected, but right now I'm feeling rather anxious and scared. When you've been dragged down to the depths you really, really don't want to find yourself on the brink of that again.

Valerian helped me when I couldnt sleep Linda.

Yes I have read that mercury greatly affects our circadian rhythms. I had a hell of a time sleeping before removal but now sleep well, unless I am bad on my diet.

This is all I could find about it, but I think it was also on the Jigsaw site that I read about it too.

http://www.jcircadianrhythms.com/content/3/1/14

Melatonin supplements help too, I wouldn't be without them.

Best luck with the zzz's Linda, and feel better soon.

Sandi
xoxo

Weird Linda cos I slept well for the first time in ages last night, but always wake up at 6, no matter what. I always feel absolutely dreadful in the mornings and don't understand any more, cos although feeling absolutely physically crap, death of my sister, immense family problems, not at home thank goodness. But the last two days have gone into the deepest black hole of depression imaginable. It's almost intolerable. Keep telling myself it's just a feeilng and hope to goodness it gets better, but certainly don't feel like that now. How I'm getting through the day, I don't know. Love Tracy

My body clock was greatly affected by mercury.

I have gone to sleep between 4am and 7am since the early 80s. When my amalgams were removed, my sleep slowly began adjusting to a more normal schedule, like going to bed between 12 midnight and 2am. This schedule also allowed a much better quality of sleep.

Thanks everyone for sharing your experiences. It helps when I am trying to put things in perspective and trying to analyse what could be wrong. I've had trouble getting back "off the sugar" because even though I'm not shovelling tons in my mouth all day exactly, I'm still having withdrawal problems. It isn't usual for me to experience them so severely. But I know that eating this way also adversely affects my sleep, though it doesn't interfere with my body clock as such.

I felt horrible from Friday through yesterday morning. I probably would have come on here and talked it through but my internet connection was down for 3 days; my husband was out of town and I wasn't able to fix it on my own. Anyway, it seemed to end yesterday afternoon as suddenly as it had started. Like a switch inside me had flipped. I'm left feeling a bit stunned.

I started taking a lot of algin and it might have helped. I don't know. I mentally went through the symptoms I was having and couldn't really work out why they were so bad. I've had problems with sugar in the past, after eating a clean diet for a long time, and it didn't do this to me. When the depression originally started I wasn't in such a bad state. SAD is more of a gradual thing, so a few cloudy days aren't going to bring it on full force. It's just mystifying. But by last night I was asking my daughter to go on a walk with me (when it's usually me making excuses not to because I'm fatigued), and I even put on some Bob Marley music while I played games with her -- that is so, so not the "depressed" me.

I'm not too bad today either. I keep waiting for the "good" spell to end and the awfulness to come back, that's the way it's always been, but maybe this time I can hope.

Do people sometimes experience mercury dumps that only last a few days? Because that's what I'm thinking might have happened. It's hard to know. I thought that if an organ dump started it usually went on for weeks or even months.

It's hard when you know you can no longer go to your GP and hope for an answer. Sometimes you just have to make the best conclusions and decisions you can yourself.

Thanks for your words too Tracy. I'm sorry you feel so awful but I would say with 99% certainty that at this moment it is due to the benzo withdrawal. If you can get a supply of the drug and do a slow taper you won't go through such a rocky ride and you will probably feel better at the end. If your GP won't cooperate there are other sources you could try if you wanted. I'm glad you at least have a support group to help you deal with the symptoms.

Thanks again all; I am going to make a concentrated effort again to sort my diet out; maybe now that I'm feeliong a bit better, it will be easier. I'll see how I go with the body clock issues over the next week or so.

Whether you withdraw from antidepressants and other psychiatric medications slowly or quickly , many people are much worse than when they started the drugs because they are essentially lobotomized permanantly by the drugs.

Erm . . . . not quite sure what you mean there. Yes the drugs can and do cause damage, but much of it can be healed over time with the right diet and supplements. It's a good thing I know this because cheerful comments like this would otherwise drive me to despair. BTW I did get the body clock problems before I took the antidepressant.

Note -- I'm feeling pretty lousy again tonight. I think it's sugar withdrawal, particularly the stomach cramps and irritability, but I still don't understand why I'm getting this so intensely. I've got to try to ride this one through. Sugar is a class A drug as far as I'm concerned, it's pure evil.