It's been a long time since I've been what you would call a morning
person. The first hour after I wake up, no matter whether I lay in bed
or get up immediately, I speak, think and move at the speed of
molasses. Since I tend to take much longer to do anything and get
confused easily when I've just woken up, I try to do as much of my
morning routine as possible the night before.
Breakfast is limited to a bowl of cereal, since anything more elaborate
is just too confusing. Oddly enough, my stomach doesn't wake up for an
hour or so, either. I don't get hungry until I've been awake for a
while, and I have no appetite. I always pick up some coffee and a
pastry or breakfast sandwich on my way to work to augment the cereal,
since I know my stomach will wake up soon and decide that cereal's not
enough.
Fate must have a twisted sense of humor, because I have been married to
two men who are obnoxiously cheerful and awake in the morning. Both my
current husband, George and my ex-husband, John, are/were the kind of
person who can open their eyes and be not only instantly awake, but
actually articulate. My ex-husband enjoyed teasing me about it, but
George is (fortunately for him) wiser and lets me wander around in my
fog unmolested by unnecessary chatter.
Believe it or not, I used to wake up at the speed of light. When I was
a child, I was often the first one out of bed, even before my parents.
This continued into my teens, which is pretty much unheard of. A
teenager who gets up at 7am on weekends? Even when I was in college I
was still bounding out of bed. In my twenties I annoyed my best friend
and house-mate, who was a slow waker, by being cheerful and talkative
first thing when I woke up. Sometime in my late twenties, though,
things changed.
A few years ago I started wondering why. How can you go through almost
thirty years of waking up instantly and then veer in the opposite
direction? At first I wondered if it had something to do with my
Multiple Sclerosis, but dismissed that idea. I started being a morning
zombie several years before I started acquiring the lesions on my
brain.
It finally dawned on me that I started having trouble waking up around
the same time that I started taking antidepressants. Not only that,
when I was pregnant and didn't take any antidepressants for six months,
I reverted back to waking easily. At the time, I assumed that it had
something to do with being pregnant.
Granted, this is something you probably won't see listed among the side
effects in the leaflet. But it also doesn't happen to everyone. Our
brains are so different that two people can experience a completely
different set of side effects on the same antidepressant. Or one may
have only mild symptoms, while the other person is getting really
socked with them.
And I don't have any proof that antidepressants have altered my ability
to wake up quickly. But the timing makes it seem likely. And I think
that it makes sense. Let's face it, antidepressants alter our brain
chemistry. There's no two ways about it. Depression is complicated and
multi-symptomatic, and antidepressants need to have a fundamental and
sweeping effect on our brains to combat it.
So I spend one hour of the day in a fog now. Before I started taking
antidepressants, it was the whole day. Seems like a good trade-off.
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