I'm so exhausted of this
I've been suffering from chronic insomnia for a year because of tinnitus, I hadn't slept for months from January to April this year then I went to gp for sleeping pills because my body would force me to have micro sleep during the daytime at work, and they put me on lorazepam for a brief period which worked to make sleep but once I tapered off lorazepam as benzo is addictive and I read some horror stories about benzo withdrawal, the T came back worse than before, and they put me on dayvigo, didn't work because I couldn't even fall asleep, and I tried zopiclone for a few months and it just lost its efficacy .
My T is loud, at least for me it's loud 24/7 because I can hear it even in a noisy environment, and I'm a light sleeper, so this noise which is unmaskable by white noise keeps me awake all night.
My gp said i can't rely on sleeping pills forever since I'm 46 which of course i know, but they don't seem to think what if they were in my position, what would they do to themselves?
Part of me feel I wanna gain my natural sleep ability back before T, I used to sleep 6 to 7 hours before Tinnitus, I was kind of a night owl and I would go to bed around 12am but i would be out of light in less than 10 mins as long as the room was completely silent, I loved the silence of the night.
So, I haven't slept for 20 days now, I mean really zero hours of sleep, and i feel like I have lost the sleep drive like a normal person, a person with normal sleep drive will sleep like a cow if they miss one night of sleep. I feel my brain no longer has sleep drive, even if my eyes feels heavy from being awake, when I close my eyes, the brain just doesn't switch off because of the noise in my head.
i never suffered from insomnia before, lived my life to the fullest before. Now, these two conditions, tinnitus and insomnia totally suck the joy out of my life. I just feel so hopeless, I've tried OTC sleep meds from magnesium, melatonin, hydroxyzine, nothing works. I seriously do not know how much longer i can endure this level of suffering, yes I'm alive but this is not real living.
Posted Aug 12, 2026, 8:23 PM UTC