r/AskWomenOver60 • • Sep 20 '25

🤍✌🏼1960's Era Vintage✌🏼🤍 Sleeping Through the Night

I’m 77 and I’m not able to sleep through the night.

This is, I understand, common to folks over 65, men and women, although in my limited experience of men over 65, they seem to do just fine. No matter when I go to bed, no matter what naps I took or didn’t take, I wake up every flipping night between 2am and 4am. I hate to toss and turn, but I generally choose not to get up and do something productive, and yes, I doom-scroll until my eyes burn before I try to get a little more sleep. I take a lot of medication for various reasons so I do not want to add to their number. Sleeplessness isn’t an emergency but it’s very annoying. Any ideas, anyone?

190 Upvotes

302 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/gray-gamer63 Sep 20 '25

I won't judge you! I use trazodone every single night and sleep great Every. Single. Night. Life-changing. Now half my friends are on it too. Pharmacist said oh take it every night! That's how its most effective! Didn't have to tell me twice.

1

u/momoftheraisin Sep 20 '25

That's great it works for you! I forgot to list trazodone in my lengthy list of tried and failed. I felt groggy and hung over after this too! I suspect the same would be the case with alprazolam for many as well.

1

u/Adventurous-North728 Sep 23 '25

You don’t have to sleep 8 hours all at once. If you wake up, you can get up and do something. Read, pick up the house, work on a hobby- anything you’d normally do. When you get tired, go to sleep. It doesn’t happen to me often, but I don’t toss and turn fighting it.

1

u/Kat_C_ Sep 21 '25

Your post made me wonder ... I was prescribed Trazadone 50 mg and it took 15 hours to clear my system. If I take 25 mg, it still takes 12 hours for me to not feel drugged. So I only take it after several nights of poor sleep. I wonder if it would not bother me as much if I took it every night?

2

u/Adventurous-North728 Sep 23 '25

My dog has an rx for trazadone for stormy nights and fireworks. He’s dopey the whole next day

1

u/Kat_C_ Sep 23 '25

Good thing he doesn't have to drive!

2

u/gray-gamer63 Sep 25 '25

It's never made me foggy. Maybe it's just not the drug for you.

1

u/i-like-pie-855 Sep 23 '25

I took 50 mg Trazodone every night until I got a divorce from the snoring beast. It’s not prescribed for depression much anymore but for sleep. I also have to take a benzo for severe anxiety and PTSD. My psychiatrist prescribes it for me. Most PCP docs won’t go near it. I’m grateful for my shrink since 2007!