I have been living with nightime incontinence and Crohn's disease for 8 years now . . . have not slept more than 4-5 hours w/o waking to use the restroom. Most nights I wake at least twice, and if I am having a rough night, it can be every 90 minutes! I too had trouble falling back to sleep, especially if I had any issues to deal with . . .

Melatonin. After a certain age our bodies slow down or cease production of melatonin, which helps regulate our body clocks and helps allow sleep. I take 3mg before bedtime. I still wake up, but getting back to sleep is easier.

A natural way to help boost melatonin is to get exposure to sunlight between 7am and 9am, when the blue light of the spectrum, which stimulates melatonin production, is strongest.

I also play a familiar CD when I get in bed, and in the morning I try to recall the last song I heard. Often I am surprised how quickly I did fall asleep, because I couldn't make it past the second or third track! I have even found that using each song on the CD for a different meditation or preparation for sleep is helpful: track #1 for setting my breathing, #2 for "scanning" the body, head to toe, for tension and relaxing as I go, #3 for deep relaxation through visualization. (My favorite visualization is of me floating, face down in the ocean in snorkel gear, gently rolling with the swells, and hearing and seeing a pod of great whales rising in a circle around me. Sometimes just their singing and their air bubbles rising around me are enough to lull me to sleep.) If you do the same series of exercises to the same songs and in the same order every night you will literally train your mind&body to respond to the music, and provide you with a pathway to sleep that you have custom-designed for yourself.

As lefthanded said Melatonin helps me to fall back to sleep when I get up. I take 2 3mg Melatonin Plus pills from Sam's. Still wake up a bunch to pee, but do get back to sleep. And, I use a 'white noise' machine to cancel the many background noises.

My sleep patterns are all over the place.

I usually go to bed anywhere from 9 PM to 11 PM. My body must think it's "nap" time because I sleep about two hours then wake up.

At that point I'm up anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours. Back to bed for another couple of hours...if I'm lucky it's three.

Up at around 5:30 AM because DS gets up to go to work and the notion of "being quiet" is apparently not in a young man's vocabulary no matter how hard they try.

I go back to bed about 6:30 - 7:00 AM and usually sleep pretty well for about 3 hours. So...I get my 6-8 hours but not all in one stretch. I wish I could but not sure how my body would react to such a long period of sleep.

I've been this way a long time. Ever since my first son was born 27 years ago. I've never been one to need a whole lot of sleep.

I do take LDN anywhere from 1 AM to 3 AM and have found that when I forget to take it (which is not very often but I have done it) I sleep better.

Me too, on the sleep pattern, Kelly, but only since MS took over, in the last 15+ years. I used to sleep like a baby.

I've only used LDN for the last 7+ yrs and will not ever stop using.....even if I'm up all night..

I'll bet Lady feels the same.

Oh, you bet I'll never stop using LDN!

I'm not too concerned with my sleep pattern because I can always take a nap during the day if I need to. Or sleep as late as I want to. Strange thing is, though, I usually don't need a nap during the day.

When we change our clocks in November and it gets dark earlier I tend to get sleepy earlier.

LDN has helped my MS sx so profoundly that I'm like you, Sally, I could be up all night and I wouldn't care! I'll sleep when I get sleepy!