Lamictal 300 mgs: Travel, Light Therapy, and Delayed Sleep Phase

If you follow my blog, you know that lamictal messes with my sleep.  If left to myself, I would sleep from three a.m. to 11.  I'd be completely out of sync with the world.

And indeed I was out of sync for months.  This changed when I started using a blue light in the mornings.  Pretty soon I was getting up around 9:15 all by myself.  No alarm, no struggle.

Then, I went out east to visit family.  And getting up became a struggle again.  I could usually make it out of bed by 9:30 or 10, but this required an alarm at 9:15 which I would then ignore for as long as I could.

Then, I stayed up all night for my Solstice vigil, and watched the sun rise.  Suddenly, I was getting up at 8:30 ... again, without an alarm.  For a confirmed night person this was a bizarre experience.

Fast forward to last week.  I was in the Midwest, visiting family.  I dutifully did my light therapy every morning, but didn't adjust my body to the time zone.  My family are all night people, and Pacific Standard Time is two hours behind Central Standard Time, so instead of sleeping from midnight to 8:30 I slept from 2 until 10.  I should have had no problem getting back into my groove at home, right?  I hadn't changed my schedule at all.  I would go home, and my body would still be on PST.  I'd go to sleep at midnight and wake up at 8:30.

But no.  Now I'm once again struggling to get up at 9:30 or 10.

I guess the position of the sun really matters (as if I hadn't figured that out by this point).  I may have thought I was keeping my body on PST, but I was getting up when the sun was in it's 10 o'clock position.  And that was enough to hose me.

I guess I need to stay up and watch a sunrise again.  Sigh.