Question about new symptoms and insomnia

[SeekingLife]

Hey guys, it's been a while since I've needed to use this forum but I find myself in a rut again. Hopefully I get over this recent stuff like I have before. Bit of a long post so bear with me. I’ve had HPPD for upwards of two years now, and have been coping with it fantastically. The first year or so was incredibly rough but I got past that and haven’t looked back. I cut out every drug except nicotine, adderall (which I am prescribed), caffeine and alcohol, all of which I handled with ease. However, at the start of the month, I went abroad to study pretty much on the other side of the world. This was awesome for the first month, but towards the end of the month I began to have horrible insomnia. I still don’t know what the cause of this insomnia was, as I was never once uncomfortable in the foreign surroundings. I have always loved to travel and be out of my own element; I guess maybe my subconscious mind could have been uncomfortable but I have no clue. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at a normal time out of nowhere, and I was getting around at most 3 hours of sleep a night. However, even with this being said, I was pretty fine. I've had insomnia before for days at a time so I wasn;t stressing at all. However, after a month of this constant insomnia, I began to have intense anxiety not only throughout the day, but especially at night before I went to sleep. To put it into words, I close my eyes, and all of a sudden I would either have racing thoughts, totally random and nonsensical that hop from one topic to the next, or I would be shaken awake almost by a random jolt of anxiety that would leave me shaking. Again, this has no relevance to concerted thoughts or worries that I'm having, it's just totally out of my own control. I’ve never experienced anxiety that was not in my control ever before, so needless to say I was terrified.  It got to the point where I got prescribed ambien, and this worked well at first but eventually stopped working. I've been home for a little over a month now and the anxiety is definitely better, but I’m still having these crazy sleep issues where I can’t go to sleep until I’m exhausted, and it’s not good quality sleep (though it’s better than it was when I was abroad). The strange thing is, I was on a completely fine sleep schedule where I would pass out at 10PM and wake up at 6AM for the first week or so that I was back home but all of a sudden I found myself not being able to sleep until late night after this period. which results in my visuals and anxiety being far worse than they were before. I can't nap at all, and I have to wait until 5-7AM to sleep out of exhaustion rather than closing my eyes and being able to fall asleep at a normal time. These new visuals include motion in my peripheral vision when I am staring at a screen in the dark, and visual snow that I did not have before. This sounds trivial, but my HPPD has remained relatively constant for a while and now all of a sudden there's a new level to them. I don't care much about them, but the sleep thing is unbearable. These substances I was totally fine with and relied on now give me anxiety, from alcohol to caffeine. I’m definitely afraid to try adderall again despite the fact I could take 2-3 last year and be totally fine, and this is a problem since I rely on it to do work. Being that I’m a bit of a hypochondriac I tend to inflame my symptoms when I’m cooped up in my house and thus it is difficult to cope with during this quarantine. I guess my questions are, has anyone coped with HPPD well for extended periods of time only to find that it's gotten worse, and has dealt with it successfully? Has anyone had these same or other sleep issues and knows how to deal with them? 

[Dsutton]

I’ve found since a bad flare up that all my symptoms are 100x more sensitive with sleep than before, and since I’m convinced it all ties in with the neck in my case, if I do about 30 min worth of a stretching and rolling Routine along with sitting under red light that it’s all slightly less. Maybe if you can string together some good sleep it will all return to normal for you. I also remember hearing someone talking about how an earthpulse device helped them which I’d love to try. 

Edited April 30, 2020 by Dsutton