Pretext:
- Have struggled with chronic insomnia (every single night) for 14 years. This has 90% of the time been characterized by difficultly staying asleep. Only recently has falling asleep become the issue.
- Was sleeping avg. 4 hours last summer when I went on Autoimmune Paleo diet and 2 weeks in noticed change in sleeping habbits- when I turned the lights off and was transitioning into sleep, my heart would race, mind race, and I didn't sleep for 4 straight nights. I did a variety of things to get out of it, various supplements, switched back to moderate/high carbs, added MCT oil. I attribute the reason this happened to a sharp change in my gut flora, going from moderate carb to very low carb (100-150 grams) or the fact that serotonin production can be greatly limited on these types of diets. Gut was sequenced a 2 years ago and shows very low microbiome diversity. I have IBS and chronic constipation.
- Since then I slept much better, typically, by eating heavy tryptophan based foods earlier in the day and then some carbs about an hour latter to shuttle competing amino acids into fat and muscle cells and leave the tryptophan to enter the brain.
Recent:
Got flu-like symptoms in Feb. and since then I have struggled to sleep for 3-4 nights of the week....at all....wide awake, but cognitively fine.
After about 6 weeks of data and experiencing this I have noticed a few things.... the big one being that I have not slept at all on Saturday, Sunday, Monday nights for the last 6 weeks. I have not slept on other nights but never on these 3 and there are no social or work consistenties that I can align with, no correlation it seems.
Im now reading about the fact that our bodies don't just have a bunch of internal clocks (circadian rhythmns) but also circaseptan rhythmns and this is the reason why organ transplants are most often rejected on the 7th or 14th, 21st day post operation and also other things like heart attack occurances.
I've read that certain illnesses follow 7-day cycles and I read this and thought it was interesting, but it's just a post (unsourced) on another forum:
a seven-day cycle has been found in fluctuations of blood pressure, acid content in blood, red blood cells, heartbeat, oral temperature, female breast temperature, urine chemistry and volume, the ratio between two important neurotransmitters, norepinephrine and epinephrine, and the rise and fall of several body chemicals such as the stress coping hormone, cortisol
http://biology.stack...-x-days-of-work
Question:
What tests should I push my doctor for? Any clue what might be going on?
