PPD

So 3 weeks ago, after the baby started sleeping longer stretches at night, I started having great difficulties falling asleep and staying asleep. This insomnia actually started feeding upon itself to the point where I started having a ton of dread and anxiety thinking about each oncoming night and having to try and sleep. I started thinking I had post partum depression because I felt completely overwhelmed by my fatigue during the day. So I went and looked up the symptoms of PPD and saw this (there are a bunch of other symptoms that are more important probably):

Insomnia
Overwhelming fatigue
Loss of appetite

Well duh, the overwhelming fatigue would be the sleep deprivation I would think or be caused by the insomnia.

Under baby blues it said:
Anxiety
Decreased concentration
Trouble sleeping

Hrrm, well I had some of those symptoms too so I was worried. My midwife gave me a prescription for ambien and I made an appointment with a therapist as well just in case. I also realized that sleeping problems were common once you had a kid since a bunch of my baby books had sections on how to cope with the night wakings and they suggested:

No usage of technology before bed - Hrm. I did this all the time. oops
Not eating too close to bedtime - Hrm, this too since I go to sleep so early
Exercise daily but only in the morning/early afternoon - I tried this by doing a bike ride one day and then swimming laps another day. Only seemed to help marginally.
Meditation/relaxation exercises - Hrm. I was never able to meditate that well before. No dice here.

After trying a bunch of these things, what did end up helping was
- Getting someone else to do the first middle of the night feeding which ended up being my parents and stop worrying about my milk supply effect as a result.
- Moving the baby out of our room - she's one noisy sleeper.
- Sleeping with white noise from the ipod - I'm such a light sleeper now that it's sad

But I still had a bunch of dread/anxiety about nights that the final thing that really helped in the end was deciding to just cave and take an ambien. The moment I did that I finally felt relaxed and what do you know, I fell asleep without having to take it and have felt great since. Of course, I still don't know how it is possible to fully recover from the amount of sleep debt I have but at least I'm not accumulating too much more now. yay. And I actually I never made the appointment with the therapist because she declared me cured over the phone after I told her I had finally fallen asleep okay. Heh.