If you go day after day, week after week, not getting enough
sleep, the toll it will take on you can be greater than you realize. Lack of
sleep can clog up your ability to think clearly, and can make you feel more raw
and sensitive emotionally. The effects tend to be cumulative, so that the
longer you've been having trouble getting enough rest, the greater the impact
on your life may be. Some people report starting to have depression,
hopelessness, or even a sense that they are losing their minds. You can start
to just plain feel shaky, physically and mentally.
So if you
feel as though you're falling apart, one possibility is that you just need to
sleep.
Being
involved in a destructive relationship can make sleep hard to come by. The
stress and emotional pain of being mistreated can keep you awake. Your worries
about what your partner will do next can do the same. Maybe sometimes -- or often
-- he doesn't let you sleep,
either to punish you about something he's angry about or as a way to force you
to have sex with him. When a man causes sleep deprivation in his partner, he is
actually committing one of the more serious forms of physical abuse -- yes,
sleep deprivation is a form of physical
abuse --
but the depth of damage he can do in these ways is often not
recognized.
If you have
young children, that adds a lot of additional challenges to getting sleep,
especially if your partner isn't carrying his weight about sharing the times of
getting out of bed to attend to a child in need.
Keep some
notes about how much sleep you get, and track your rest patterns over a period
of weeks. Putting down on paper what is going on can help you to assess whether
lack of sleep is actually one of the major contributors to emotional and
physical struggles you are having.