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A Year of Grief and Worry Making it Hard to Sleep

I believe this condition may have started for me due to the distressing situation of my stepmother's death. Her passing was a difficult one for many reasons, among them my father was forced to abide by her living will and allow her to be taken off life support when it was proved that she was brain dead. Yet, it took a week for her to pass and it was an awful process of searching for a place where she could enter hospice, etc.


During most of the process I remained steely and determined to take as much pressure off my Dad as possible. Then it was months of worrying about Dad as he went through the grieving process and became painfully ill from it.

So there were many many nights filled with racing thoughts, sometimes days with little or no sleep at all. I believe, too, that I simply began to avoid that time in the dark between waking and sleeping as the memories were so awful. I feel like that created an enormous sleep deficit and the inability to sleep until 4 or 5 am. I feel as if my life has literally been flipped from day to night. I simply must turn things back round again because I need to return to a normal life pattern again.

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Welcome! This site is continuously being created by students of Dr. William C. Dement's Sleep And Dreams course at Stanford University.

We made this site as a call to action for people all over the world to live healthier, happier, safer, and more productive lives by learning about their own sleep. We have faith that reading the information provided on this site will motivate you to be smart about your sleep deprivation and strategic about your alertness in order to live life to your fullest, most energetic potential.

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