15 years of thinking I had an attitude problem

In 2003 my alarm went off at 5:15am every school day. My parents had just moved to Punggol, and the North East Line wasn’t running there yet, so getting to school was a long trip in the dark.

I slept on my desk a lot. Teachers took it as disrespect, and sometimes they sent me out of class. I believed them. For about 15 years I thought I had an attitude problem that I needed to fix.

Junior college and university were worse. I couldn’t wake up on time, and I was late for classes and sometimes even exams. My grades were ok, so nobody, me included, thought something might actually be wrong. At night I’d go to bed early and just lie there awake.

In 2017 it caught up with me. I went to A&E 4 times with stomach pain bad enough that I curled up into a ball. The doctors ran blood tests and scans, and once checked my heart because I was sure it was a heart attack. Everything came back clear.

I was relieved. I was also stuck.

The pain kept coming back, and it started taking the rest of my life with it. I was tired all the time, I struggled to concentrate, and I missed a lot of plans because I couldn’t get out of bed. At some point I just decided: I can’t work like this, I can’t sleep like this, and this needs to be fixed.

So I tried everything I could find. Keto, paleo, intermittent fasting, veggie shakes. Pretty much every supplement that shows up when you search “supplements that help sleep”. Exercise from HIIT to long endurance runs.

Most of it didn’t work for me. What finally moved things was sitting down with doctors, telling them everything instead of only the part that seemed relevant, and sticking with their plan for a long time. It was slow. It did get better.

If you’re reading this at 3am, two things I wish someone had told me sooner:

• Falling asleep in class isn’t always an attitude problem.
• If your sleep has been bad for months, see a doctor and tell them all of it. Poor sleep often comes with something else that’s worth finding.

These days I guard my evenings and weekends. They’re for family and rest, because I’ve seen what happens when you keep going without them.

You’re not alone in this. It took me a long time to work that out.