Autism and sleep issues

This is a post that I was hoping I wouldn’t need to write. I knew that lots of autistic children had sleep issues but I was hoping that we weren’t going to be one of them.

I kept saying ‘Aren’t we lucky that Edward doesn’t keep waking us in the night?’ He has always gone to bed and gone to sleep with no problem. Even if he did wake in the night, he would just stay quiet and stay in bed until someone got up. This is no longer the case….

The Autistic Brain

In my experience of having Edward, the autistic brain is like a rapid fire pinball machine. It can’t seem to settle, it flits from one thing to another at lightning speed. You just have to listen to Edward talk. He talks completely random gibberish and jumps from talking about one thing to another. He struggles to get his words out, it’s like he knows what he wants to say but his brain is moving too fast to remember what he was saying. I hope that makes sense to some of you. I think that this is the reason why lots of autistic children and adults have trouble sleeping.

Disrupted sleep

During the last month or so, Edward has been waking up more during the night. He gets out of bed and comes into my room. He used to sneak into my bed and go straight to sleep which I didn’t mind but then he started fidgeting.

For a while, if he got up in the night I would put him straight back to bed and he would go back without any fuss and stay there until someone got up. I could manage this.

This doesn’t happen anymore…..he gets up and I try and put him back to bed but he now shouts and resists. Eventually I give up and he comes in my bed and I try and get some more sleep, not easy when you’ve got a 7 year old fidgeter next to you.

Will a weighted blanket help?

I can’t carry on like this, so I managed to borrow a weighted blanket to try out and see if that made a difference. I had heard lots of amazing things about them so I thought that this would be the answer…..

So, as you can see, varying degrees of success….I am disappointed as I really thought that this would make a difference and our sleep problems would be solved….

What other things can we try?

I know there are lots of other things that we could try like lavender hotties, a calm down routine before bed, magnesium etc and the last resort being medication.

However, I think that I also have to accept that sleep disruption is something that comes with the condition of autism and that we have to find ways of surviving.

So, I’m guessing we’re not the only family going through this. What’s your experience of autism and sleep issues? Do you have any recommendations that we could try? Are you just starting out on your lack of sleep journey? Let me know in the comments, I’d love to connect.