Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate by Cynthia Kim

Author:Cynthia Kim [Cynthia Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857009494
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Published: 2014-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

Insomnia and ASD

While I’ve known since childhood that I’m not very coordinated, I had no idea that I suffer from insomnia. It was only when I came across an article linking ASD to sleep problems that I recognized my sleep patterns as typical signs of insomnia:

•prolonged sleep latency (time to fall asleep)

•reduced sleep efficiency (decreased ratio of time asleep to time in bed)

•reduced total sleep time

•reduced sleep duration and continuity

•night awakening marked by long periods of time awake.

Apparently, I’ve always had abnormal sleeping habits. Sometimes it takes me a long time to fall asleep. Some nights I wake up a half dozen times; others I wake up at 3:00 a.m. feeling like it’s the middle of the afternoon. I can hit the ground running at 5:00 a.m. with an energy level that seems to make people angry. Recently I’ve started shift sleeping more often, perhaps thanks to the hormonal changes of perimenopause.

Curious about how common insomnia is in autistic people, I was shocked to learn that the prevalence of insomnia in children on the spectrum is 40 to 80 percent.1 Yet, in reading about typical symptoms of autism and Asperger’s, sleep disturbance is not only missing from the core list of diagnostic symptoms, it’s rarely mentioned at all.

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