Vitamin D and Sleep - Month 5 - The Crash

The plateau that started in month 4 continued into month 5. I will call it the crash as I don’t know how else to describe it. Perhaps it was the fact that I had improved my sleep that it felt worse than it was. For some reason the first two weeks of month five were a downward slope to bad sleep. It was quite disappointing because I was really surprised by it. By bad sleep I mean that the middle of the night insomnia returned. I had nights of light sleep. With that came the usual tiredness. Quite frankly it was a solid downer. What was happening? Why did my bad sleep return? Some of it was outside stress. But was that all of it? I had a vitamin D test to see where I was at. It came in at 57. Not much of a change from my last test.

Half way through month 5, I was desperate to try to get back on track. Up to this point, the only B vitamins I was taking were in my multivitamin. It contains roughly 100% RDA of each. I had a bottle of just B vitamins that contained 100% RDA of each. I decided to experiment and start taking an extra B vitamin capsule at bed time.

The first few days it seemed to do nothing. Light sleep and insomnia. After a week of this, my sleep started to get better. If I woke up at night, I was able to fall back asleep faster. I started feeling a bit better in the morning. The B vitamins seemed to be working or at least the placebo effect was. Whatever was doing it, I wasn’t going to question it. I just wanted my good sleep back. I finished out month 5 with a slow climb out.

Month 6 - Climbing out of the hole

Month 6 started with me continuing with the extra B vitamins. I did start to notice a change. I started dreaming more. Not all of them good I should say. At least it was better than lying awake. I really started to feel better. My sleep started to really improve again. I was so thankful that I was not completely starting over. Yet at the same time I was a little startled that my sleep could regress like that. The other thing that was clear was how much the B vitamins affected my sleep. At about half way through month 6, it was clear that those extra B’s were changing my sleep in a good way. I kept on taking them for the first half of month 6.

I started to notice that I was dreaming excessively. I would go to sleep and wake up two hours later and be able to remember multiple dreams. I never rememeber dreams in the first few hours of sleep. Perhaps because our REM sleep mostly occurs in the second half of the night. Along with the excessive dreaming, my sleep apnea got worse. More apneas, clear airway, etc. I was sleeping but it was not restful sleep. I decided to stop taking the B vitamins.

B vitamins can make or break my sleep.

Shortly after quitting the B vitamins, the excessive dreaming started to subside. The beginning of the night of sleep was sound sleep again. My sleep apnea started to return to normal. This pattern continued through the end of month 6. I started sleeping like a stone. Some of the outside stress started to fade as well. How much of that contributed to it, I don’t know. How do you figure out what is causing your sleep to be bad? Vitamins? Stress? What you ate? The moon is full? Your coffee was too strong?

I will say that B vitamins, without a doubt, can affect my sleep in both good and bad ways. Perhaps my B vitamins ran low? It will remain a mystery, but I am glad that it seemed to work. Month 7 had by far the best sleep I have had in 8 years.

Robert Lukeman