restless legs and mind

Have you heard of Restless Legs Syndrome? Yes, there really is such a thing. I had it bad when I was pregnant, and looked up stuff on the Web. I found out I really didn't have it as bad as some people do. What it did to me mainly was keep me from falling asleep. Other people are prevented from sitting still even long enough to take a plane trip or go to the movies! It's a very difficult feeling to describe, having "restless" legs. You just feel like you have to move them. It's like trapped energy, but different than an ordinary "tense" feeling. One person online described the feeling this way: imagine your legs and arms (they can be affected too) are hollow, and then imagine someone taking a really long bottle brush and running it up inside your hollow limbs, tickling and irritating them. Some people get relief by walking or running. The only thing that relieved the feeling for me was jerking and twitching my legs, giving in to the spasms they wanted to have. I slept on the couch a lot back then.

It's coming back, just a little. I found two things that reduced the severity of my "RLS" before - eating a lot of bananas, and doing yoga.

Then there's the restless mind problem. I have talked to enough people (all women, coincidentally?) who suffer this along with me, so I know it's "real" but I doubt it has a proper name. That's what I'm getting more and more now. If something wakes me up and a thought pops in my head, it wakes up other thoughts which are often adrenalin-producing, so before I know it I'm awake for a few more hours. My body will still feel exhausted, but my mind is going full force. If my body weren't so tired, I could just get up and do something useful, but instead I tend to lie there and fret.

I used to watch recorded episodes of "Nova" (or other documentary type programs) to help me fall asleep - they were stimulating enough to keep my mind from wandering, but boring enough to not keep me awake. I learned a few things about science, history, and airplanes. Guess it's time to pull those out again. Unfortunately for my purposes, documentary programmers in recent years have been trying to make their shows more visually stimulating (supposedly to engage, as David calls it, "the youth demographic"), with flashing graphics, creative reenactments, dramatic voices, etc. Some of the efforts come across as rather pathetic. The long special episode on "string theory" for example, had nothing for you to look at other than talking heads of scientists and illustrations of atom particles (that's all there is to see in string theory!). So they would do silly things like draw in flashing neon-looking lights behind the talking heads. That wasn't enough to keep me awake!

Speaking of awake, someone else is now. She's staying home with Daddy today. I'm envious.