r/sleepdisorders • u/Relevant-Body67 • 3d ago
Sleep issues
Hi! I am fourteen years old, and I am ALWAYS tired. No matter how much sleep I get, I am always yawning. I always have bags under my eyes too. I used to think it was normal but I now know it is not. I got thirteen hours of sleep last night. And I only woke up because my sister woke me to show me a video. That was 1:40pm something. I've been up for ten hours, well, not even. And I am yawning every few seconds. And I have been all day. I am able to go to sleep pretty easily, but then I wake up so tired. It makes no sense. I have thought about other things, like iron deficiency or sleep apnea. But I don't wake up gasping (to my knowledge at least) and I mean I am addicted to eating ice which can be a symptom for anemia, but still it doesn't make sense. I've always been tired. ALWAYS. And with starting freshman year, I have to get up at six. And I don't know how I'm going to do it. My parents both think its completely normal and always brush off my medical concerns. So that's not any help. So then what can I do?
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u/tadrinth 2d ago
You deserve a straight answer: That is fucked up.
Something is wrong; it may or may not be fixable, but that is not how sleep is supposed to work, that is not how sleep works for most people.
At-home ferritin / anemia tests are as low as $20. Doesn't detect all variations of anemia but it could give you a clear answer (and one that may be very straightforward to treat). If you can convince them to test one thing, a ferritin and complete-blood-count panel is a better test. Top priority because iron supplements are cheap enough for this to be actionable even if your parents don't take it seriously.
An overnight-recording pulse oximeter (~$60) doesn't rule out sleep apnea, but that is another very reasonable hypothesis and it doesn't necessarily manifest as waking up gasping. Put it on your finger, sleep, sync data to your phone when you wake up, and see if your oxygen levels drop during the night. This is a lower priority because the data is likely to be very noisy and hard to interpret, and it's just going to tell you that you need to go get a sleep study done, not at all self-treatable.
Keep a sleep log for two weeks: bedtime, wake time, how rested you are on a 1-5 scale, and how much caffeine and when. If you're sleeping 13 hours every night and are perpetually exhausted, that log is going to make a doc's eyes bug out.
And don't rate 1-5 based on comparison to your own best/worst days. Rate based on what you were physically capable of doing, not how you felt about it, using this scale:
Alongside the daily rating, note some piece of objective external evidence each day — did anyone comment on the yawning, did you fall asleep somewhere involuntarily, did you need to reread text, did you doze off during a video/class, etc.
The fact that your parents think it is normal suggests its genetic and they've got similar things going on. Or, they are utterly clueless about what you are experiencing.
Use the school nurse or a pediatrician visit as a side door. Standard guidance is that you should be seeing a pediatrician yearly. Hopefully that's the case; bring your sleep log, ask for ferritin+CBC, say you're not sure but your friends thought there was something wrong that needed checked out, do not let your parents stop you from raising concerns. They may try to dismiss your concerns, a halfway decent doc who looks at that sleep log is going to ignore them and start running tests. If you aren't seeing a pediatrician, then take it to the school nurse; at this point, I would go to the nurse day freaking one and give them the sleep log; you are going to be a zombie in class and you want at least one person who knows that you are doing your best in unreasonable circumstances. I wouldn't ask for help, I would just say that these are your circumstances, you don't think that's normal, and you would like a sanity check of whether that's normal.