By 8 o'clock at night, my body was done, and I mean done. I'd crawl into bed around 9, completely worn out, thinking tonight would finally be the night, and then I'd lay there until midnight or later with this jitter running through my whole body. If you're searching "tired but wired," I'm guessing you know exactly what I'm talking about.
I'm not a doctor. This is my own experience and what I learned from it, not medical advice.
Exhausted, but my body wouldn't settle
The part that's so hard to explain to anyone is that I wasn't "not tired." I was so tired. My body just would not settle down, and my mind wouldn't either. It felt like my body was battling that moment where you're supposed to let go and lay it down for the night, and most nights it won. So I'd get a few hours of sleep, drag myself through the next day, and end up right back in bed at 9 with the same jitter.
What I tried, and how it made it worse
When you're living like that, you grab whatever might help. Caffeine has never worked for me, so that wasn't my crutch. Food was. I ate horribly back then, a ton of sugary stuff, just trying to find some kind of energy to get me through the day.
At night it was melatonin, and at first it actually worked. But over time it took more to do the same job, and then more than that, until I was taking an insane amount just to fall asleep. When I tried to come off it, I hit what I now know is called rebound sleeplessness, where your sleep gets even worse than it was before you started. I didn't have a name for it back then. I just knew I was worse off.
So it turned into this cycle of trying something, having it work for a night or two, watching it stop working, coming off it and starting over. Every round left me a little more worn down and a little more at my wits end.
Come to find out, I was backwards
I was at my lowest when a friend told me about a practitioner she'd been seeing who specialized in Chinese medicine. I went, and at that very first visit she took one look at me, asked me a few questions, and suggested we do a saliva cortisol test. If you didn't know, that test checks your cortisol a few times over the course of one day, so you see the whole pattern instead of a single number.
Low and behold, my rhythm was way off. My cortisol was peaking in the evening, not in the morning like it's supposed to. I was backwards.
Why that explains tired but wired
Cortisol gets called the stress hormone, but it also runs on a daily rhythm. Normally it's highest shortly after you wake up, which is part of what gets you going in the morning, and then it slowly drops through the day so it's low by the time you go to bed. That drop is part of what lets your body wind down.
Mine was doing the opposite. So at 9 o'clock, right when my body should have been coming down, it was getting the push it was supposed to get first thing that morning. Once I understood that, the jitter finally made sense to me. It also changed how I looked at the sugar and the melatonin, because I'd been forcing energy in all day and forcing sleep at night, when the real problem was the timing underneath both of them.
Someone finally saw it
I honestly felt a little justified. For so long it felt like nobody could see what was going on with me, and here was someone who looked at me once and knew exactly where to look. There was a reason I felt the way I did, and now I had a test result that showed it. From there, she and I worked together on adjusting things and supporting my body.
If this sounds like your nights
If you're lying awake at night wondering how you can be this tired and still not sleep, I wrote a whole guide on it. Understanding Cortisol and Adrenal Fatigue goes a lot deeper into cortisol and adrenal fatigue and tells my full story with it, more than I could ever fit in one post. It's a good place to start if you want to understand what your body might be trying to tell you.
