Wondering if I'm the only one...

Hi, interesting question and one that I was discussing only last night! I am diagnosed AS and have always suffered the same difficulty, no matter the state of my physical health. I did shift work at one time, and certainly the changes of shift do put regular sleep hours out of question, but I haven't done them in 25 years, and nothing about my sleep has changed.

I can say for certain that AS is a root cause. Depending on the 'load' I am carrying at any one time, I can get exhausted by any social intercourse. The amount of physical work I've done in a day doesn't affect it one iota, it's the load in my head that counts, and it's a rare day when nothing is troubling me. I tend to think that it's because AS necessarily involves unresolvable processing that lies behind it. If we acknowledge that sleep is the time period when our brain processes the day's input, it makes sense to me that little gets processed in our brain in the way that NT brains are supposed to.

I wake up tired most days. Some days I just have to sleep at some point because of sheer exhaustion, ranging from minutes to hours. At work, I perfected the art of the 30 minute 'power nap' just to get through the day, and sometimes, if that wasn't enough, I simply worked a short day so that I could get home and away from the sensory inputs that a normal day brings. I acknowledge that I had those opportunities because of the type of work I do, and apart from lunch break, they aren't available to everyone, of course.

I'm convinced that AS, by its' very nature, ruins the quality of my sleep - I often wake up with my head filled with the 'processing' that never ends. If you have excluded any physical causes, you're only left with AS, but as stateofindependence says, AS should be your last explanation, not your first, you could just as easily be suffering from a form of narcolepsy or any one of a myriad of physical things. For my part, I suspect that this is a very common AS issue, so I'll be interested to see what others have to say.

Hi, interesting question and one that I was discussing only last night! I am diagnosed AS and have always suffered the same difficulty, no matter the state of my physical health. I did shift work at one time, and certainly the changes of shift do put regular sleep hours out of question, but I haven't done them in 25 years, and nothing about my sleep has changed.

I can say for certain that AS is a root cause. Depending on the 'load' I am carrying at any one time, I can get exhausted by any social intercourse. The amount of physical work I've done in a day doesn't affect it one iota, it's the load in my head that counts, and it's a rare day when nothing is troubling me. I tend to think that it's because AS necessarily involves unresolvable processing that lies behind it. If we acknowledge that sleep is the time period when our brain processes the day's input, it makes sense to me that little gets processed in our brain in the way that NT brains are supposed to.

I wake up tired most days. Some days I just have to sleep at some point because of sheer exhaustion, ranging from minutes to hours. At work, I perfected the art of the 30 minute 'power nap' just to get through the day, and sometimes, if that wasn't enough, I simply worked a short day so that I could get home and away from the sensory inputs that a normal day brings. I acknowledge that I had those opportunities because of the type of work I do, and apart from lunch break, they aren't available to everyone, of course.

I'm convinced that AS, by its' very nature, ruins the quality of my sleep - I often wake up with my head filled with the 'processing' that never ends. If you have excluded any physical causes, you're only left with AS, but as stateofindependence says, AS should be your last explanation, not your first, you could just as easily be suffering from a form of narcolepsy or any one of a myriad of physical things. For my part, I suspect that this is a very common AS issue, so I'll be interested to see what others have to say.