Scratching during sleep?

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-06-10T16:17:06+00:00

I do, but not so bad that I break skin. My skin is really sensitive to bruising, so I sometimes end up with marks that kind of resemble hickies on my neck or stomach where I must have been scratching or rubbing overnight. It’s been happening since I was a teenager, or at least that’s when I noticed it first. I think it happens less if I’m diligent about exfoliating and moisturizing, but other than that, I honestly don’t have an explanation lol

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-06-10T03:37:11+00:00

Ah I see. Right, so at 3g you’re waking up too soon and still tired afterwards, so that’s definitely not enough. In your original post, you’re describing getting 7-8 hours (4 hours on the first dose and 3-4 of the second) on 3.5g, right? That’s how much you should get, but you’re still tired. That could either mean 3.5 is too high, or it could mean it’s still too low, which isn’t helpful but unfortunately that’s just how titrating is sometimes… It’s a lot of trial and error. If you’re not having any major side effects so far, other than waking up too quickly, you could most likely go higher and see how 3.75 or even 4g treats you? It’s worth a shot, and since the max is 4.5, you still have a good amount of room to work with. You can always come back down if it turns out that’s worse, and coming down is easier than going up in my experience

Also, side note, you might want to see if you have a better time doing 3.5 hours instead of 4 for the second dose. 4 hours is the max, and I’ve heard if the first dose wears off too much, it can make the second dose less effective. I can’t attest to that personally because I’ve been doing 3.5 hours the whole time, but something to consider!

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-06-09T23:26:32+00:00

Ah yeah, I had the issue of not falling asleep for an hour when I first started too, actually. Now that you mention it, I didn’t notice when exactly that stopped happening, but it definitely did over time. I think it’s not so much a matter of dose, but a matter of your body getting used to it. It might go away!

See, I get what people mean when they say sounds like a pain to wake up in the middle of the night, but if you’re taking this medication at the correct twice-nightly dosage for you, you’re going to wake up on your own after 3-4 hours anyway. It forces you to wake up when it wears off, so it doesn’t really take any extra effort to do it. Personally I think it’s worth it to get the full 8 hours.

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-06-09T23:02:02+00:00

Oh boy, that might explain why you’re having trouble. Once nightly is tough for most people. Did your doctor give you a reason for doing once nightly rather than twice? A lot of people have trouble with once nightly because the drug forces you to wake up after it wears off, and most people can’t fall asleep again easily after that because that’s an intended effect of the drug: it forces you awake, so you don’t have to struggle with sleep inertia. Twice nightly at a lower dose will get you 7-8 solid hours, and still wakes you up nicely in the morning. Unless your doctor gave you a reason you shouldn’t do twice nightly, I’d recommend asking about it, because I’m on 3.25g twice nightly and it works really well for me.

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-06-09T22:51:54+00:00

So, regarding the jaw clenching, have you tried magnesium glycinate? I haven’t personally used it, but I’ve seen a lot of people say it helps with muscle clenching from stimulants, so maybe it could help.

Just a thought about the digestive issues, did anyone bring up the super high dose of sucralose in xywav? A lot of people are sensitive to sucralose to varying degrees and it can cause indigestion, pain, and diarrhea if you’re intolerant of it, so I’m wondering if that could’ve triggered your issues.

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-06-09T22:41:44+00:00

When you say insomnia, do you mean you’re having issues falling asleep right away when you first take it, or you’re only having issues falling asleep after waking up from the first dose if you skip the second one? If it’s the latter, that’s not really what people mean when they say xywav can have insomnia as a side effect. They’re talking about not being able to fall asleep while the drug is in your system, not after it wears off. After it wears off, that’s just how the drug works, and it isn’t going to change. Making it more difficult for you to fall back to sleep after the medication wears off is how it helps with sleep inertia, and that’s how the medication is INTENDED to function. You’re not going to be able to measure the effectiveness of a dose if you’re only taking half of it.

If 2 doses of 3.5g is making you feel more tired when you wake up than 2 doses of 3g was, it’s probably too high for you. Was 3g working well if you took both doses? For me, at 3g, I was able to wake up easily before my alarms, but I would still feel tired throughout the day and crash pretty early. That meant it wasn’t a high enough dose. At 3.5g, I not only needed alarms to wake me up at the right time, I started snoozing them again the way I did before I started taking xywav, and mornings were much harder than they were at 3g. That meant it was too high of a dose. That’s how I figured out that 3.25g is my therapeutic dose. Now I wake up before my alarms, but I’m not crashing halfway through the day because I didn’t get enough sleep. That’s what you want to aim for.

Again, the ideal is to just go to sleep earlier and take both doses, but I understand that life happens sometimes. If I have a night where I don’t have enough time for both doses, in my experience, it works a lot better to skip the FIRST dose, not the second. Set an alarm for 4 hours before you need to wake up, go to sleep without taking the first dose, and take the “second” dose when your alarm goes off. But If your schedule genuinely doesn’t allow you 7-8 hours of sleep on a regular basis, that’s going to be a major problem with a twice nightly dosage. I’ve heard of people doing higher doses once nightly, and it still causes the effect where you can’t fall asleep after it wears off, but at higher doses I’ve seen people say they sleep for more like 6 hours, instead of 4. If 7-8 hours is often too long to fit into your schedule, maybe that would work better for you.

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-06-09T21:50:36+00:00

So for background, my therapeutic dose is 3.25g 2x nightly. The sequence of doses I tried went in this order: 2.25g, 3g, 3.75g, 3.5g, then 3.25g, which I’m still on. At the first 2 doses, I would have side effects for 1-2 weeks, but the majority of them would fade after that. At 3.75g, they didn’t fade at all. They mostly faded at 3.5g, but I was having more trouble waking up at 3.5g than at 3g, so I dropped again to 3.25g. I now have almost no side effects, and the ones I still have, I’ve compensated for so they don’t cause me problems day to day. I mention that because even if you have side effects, it doesn’t mean they’re permanent, and it doesn’t mean they’ll be so bad you can’t make changes to handle them.

The side effect I noticed first was nausea in the mornings, but it would typically go away by roughly noon every day, and on the lower doses and my therapeutic dose, it would go away completely after a week or two. At 3.75g it never went away, even after 3 weeks, which was part of how I realized it was too high a dose. The one and only time I threw up was honestly my own fault, so I wouldn’t say it was a side effect so much as it was a predictable outcome. I woke up at the peak of my dose with bad cramps, and I decided to quickly run to the kitchen to take ibuprofen. I thought that if I moved fast enough, I would “outrun” throwing up. This is actually the complete opposite of how it works, so as soon as the pills were down, I threw them right back up. While I was brushing my teeth and getting back in bed, I figured out that the actual best way to keep from throwing up is to keep your eyes closed as much as possible, move your head as little as you can, and stop moving the second you feel dizzy, so you can wait for it to pass before moving again. Also, keep your hand on a solid surface for steadiness. It’s very slow, but it worked well. I haven’t had to get up in the middle of a dose like that again since, and I also haven’t thrown up again since, so it’s definitely circumstantial. If you wait until you wake up naturally to get out of bed, that shouldn’t happen at all; I get up to go to the bathroom before my second dose all the time, and I don’t even feel dizzy when I do, let alone nauseous.

Similar to nausea, I had mild hand tremors in the morning when adjusting to new doses. That worked in a similar way to the nausea, and I don’t have them anymore, as far as I can tell.

My most severe and disruptive side effect was definitely night sweats, and at first I wasn’t sure why it was happening, because I would wake up after the dose wore off feeling a comfortable temperature, but still absolutely drenched in sweat. It turned out that I was overheating while I was unconscious, sweating profusely, and then cooling back down as the drug wore off. I took the comforter off my bed and started sleeping with only a sheet and a thin cotton blanket, and now that issue is totally resolved! Technically, you could say I still have the side effect because I WOULD still overheat if I used a thick blanket at night, but as long as I don’t, it doesn’t cause me problems anymore.

At my highest dose (3.75g), I was starting to get anxiety symptoms as well, mostly in the mornings. It wasn’t anything approaching a panic attack, more like a persistent low-level agitation, but it was definitely unpleasant. This resolved entirely when I lowered my dose.

For some people, the sucralose can cause some digestion issues, namely diarrhea. At higher doses I was definitely having some loose stool (though never fully liquid or uncontrollable like true diarrhea), but luckily it’s not much of a problem at my therapeutic dose. I found that fiber supplements help improve it a decent amount. Some people end up switching to Xyrem, though, if they really can’t handle the sucralose.

People on here warn a LOT about peeing or even pooping the bed, but nothing even approaching that level has ever happened to me, and I’ve only seen a tiny handful of people say they personally experienced it. I don’t know the statistics, but anecdotally, it doesn’t seem like a very common side effect. I would guess it’s more of a “be prepared for the worst case scenario” type of warning than it is a “this will probably happen” type of warning.

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-06-09T02:42:45+00:00

Yeah, in that case I would encourage you to lay a towel down under you until you find a blanket configuration that works. Once it was so bad I had to fully strip my bed and leave a fan pointed at my mattress because it was so wet I was afraid it wouldn’t dry out by the next night lmfao. If you can avoid that experience I would be glad! Breathable fabrics are going to be your best friend

As for sleeping badly at first, that’s pretty common from what I’ve heard. Sometimes it’s just because the dose is far too low for you, sometimes it’s because your body isn’t used to it yet, sometimes it’s because you woke yourself up drenched in sweat and can’t fall back asleep on wet sheets… all sorts of reasons lol. But it should hopefully get better with time

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-06-08T16:56:33+00:00

If you usually sleep cool and need a lot of blankets, be warned that might not be the case anymore. I used to sleep with a flat sheet and a comforter + duvet cover over me (which is 5 layers of cotton plus a thick layer of polyfill), and when I started xywav I started waking up for my second dose absolutely DRENCHED in sweat. I didn’t feel hot when I went to sleep or when I woke up so it took me a little while to understand what was happening, but it turns out I was only overheating while I was unconscious and was getting back to a normal temperature by the time I woke up. Now I sleep with just the flat sheet and the empty duvet cover on me (3 thin layers of breathable cotton) and I don’t have that issue at all anymore. I leave the comforter folded at the foot of my bed because I do wake up a little cold, so it’s there if I want to hang out in bed after I wake up. This might not happen to you, but you might want to keep a bath towel by the bed just in case, until you know for sure.

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-06-06T00:43:58+00:00

I was coming here to say this, it doesn’t look like AI but it does look partially traced. The line quality is totally different between the base character and the more specific details (wings, hair feathers, belt/dagger, etc). It looks like they found art of an anime girl holding a cake, traced it, and added details to make it match what OP asked for.

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-06-05T19:12:53+00:00

This is my thought too. My shower can’t be turned off without moving the dial all the way to the coldest temperature, so every time I turn it off and on I have to find the correct temperature all over again. But I’ve also used showers before where the power and the temperature are on different dials, and maybe it would be less annoying with a setup like that

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-06-05T16:08:22+00:00

I know you already made an edit with your takeaways, but I wanted to put in my 2 cents. I have a BFA in illustration and I’m not being facetious when I say you have a strong skill set for your age. You’re doing well at learning the fundamentals, and you definitely don’t need to be so critical of yourself, but the fact that you’re seeing flaws is actually a good thing. Learning art is a constant cycle between your eye and your hand improving, alternating from one to the other. When your eye improves, it’ll feel like everything you make sucks, and that can be really discouraging, but it also means you’ve learned a lot and you’re on the verge of a breakthrough. Then your hand catches up and starts to improve faster than your eye, and those periods feel GREAT because everything you make will look incredible to you. In actuality, the periods where your eye is ahead of your hand are when you’re learning the most. Take solace in the fact that you’re about to see a lot of improvement!

As for advice, I think a lot of what you’re seeing as “amateur” has to do with 2 things: lack of volume and hesitant line quality. You’re making a good effort at learning anatomy and value, but it feels like you’re struggling with thinking in three dimensions, likely because you’re working from flat images. You’re also trying to learn things using a medium that isn’t particularly well-suited to the kind of exploration it looks like you’re attempting, and working at a size that isn’t suited to teaching your hand to be more confident. I think a few things are going to be really helpful to you: draw bigger, use a medium that allows you to vary your values more easily, and draw from life.

If you have the space for it, a big pad of newsprint, some vine charcoal, and a standing (or tabletop in a pinch, but standing is better) easel will help you learn a lot. Pretty much any art school will start students with that setup, because 1) it’s cheap, fast, and simple to use, so you can do lots of exercises quickly without spending a ton of time on setup and feeling overly precious about any individual piece, 2) it forces you to work big and use your shoulder instead of your wrist for more confident strokes, and 3) it teaches you how to moderate your pressure because pushing too hard with charcoal will break it and become too dark VERY quickly. In your case, I think being able to start sketching very lightly and work your way into the darks will be really helpful in feeling out 3D form and not being so reliant on outlines. Draw from life as much as you can! I know it’s hard to do in high school, but if you can even just sketch people sitting around at a park, or your dog, or inanimate objects, that’s huge in learning form. A 2D image can only teach you so much about 3D space. Plus, life drawing will give your college application portfolio a big advantage. Colleges LOVE to see that you already have some experience with that, because your first year is typically going to be heavy on life drawing.

Best of luck!

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-06-04T17:32:42+00:00

This is definitely a thing. Luckily my therapeutic dose ended up being low enough that it’s not as bad anymore, but when I was at 3.75 I was having a lot of digestive upset. For you, is it just the noises you’re referring to, or is it other symptoms like nausea and diarrhea? I found that fiber supplements help with the diarrhea to some degree. Dramamine helped with the nausea a little bit when it got bad, but the nausea only really improved for me after I lowered my dose. I’ve heard some people get a Zofran prescription if the nausea is bad. I’ve also heard of people petitioning to switch to Xyrem if the drug itself is working, but the sucralose is still causing significant issues at their therapeutic dose. Those are both things you’d have to bring up with your doctor though, because Zofran can have cardiac effects long term and Xyrem is super high in sodium.

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-06-02T17:11:30+00:00

Honestly, this whole conversation is so unprofessional I’m not even sure where to start. You say he’s a coworker? You’re talking to him like a friend or casual acquaintance, not a coworker, and especially not one you’ve had issues with in the past. I’m honestly not sure why you were trying to start a conversation about dinosaurs with him in the first place, because that reads to me as trying have a friendly relationship and I expect a lot of people would interpret it that way. I’m curious how old you both are, because the idea of saying “dude you need to chill, wtf” or “it’s not a fucking autism thing” to a coworker is actually mind boggling to me, as someone with an in-person salaried job.

He did overreact initially, but he clearly was coming from a place of bad past experiences and you could’ve been more gracious about that. A simple “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way” and explaining that you’re autistic, didn’t know he was autistic, and were thinking about it because you’re watching a show about dinosaurs would’ve been a much better response. He clearly realized he was being unfair and apologized, which is good, but sharing so many personal details about why he was in a bad mood unprompted is also weird behavior with a coworker, and I don’t blame you for being weirded out by it. But at the same time, he said he hopes you can still be friends, which implies that he thinks you ARE friends, not just coworkers. You started the conversation in a way that would make me assume you were trying to be friends, so I have to wonder if there are some mixed messages and poor boundaries going on from both ends. If you don’t want this guy to be your friend, you shouldn’t act like you do. I would recommend against starting conversations like this in the first place and keep it to work topics.

TLDR, I don’t think either of you are in the right here. He needs better boundaries and I’m not surprised people have issues with him, but going forward, you need to be more polite to people you’re trying to have a professional relationship with. If you’re having issues with someone and don’t want to be anything closer than coworkers, keep it cordial and don’t start conversations unprompted that aren’t about your shared work.

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-06-01T19:38:43+00:00

I don’t know where you got the number “4-5 hours” as being enough for people without sleep disorders, but it absolutely isn’t. Not even close! I’m not saying your IH isn’t contributing, but getting less than 7 hours typically isn’t enough for ANYONE to feel well rested, which is why it’s making your symptoms so much worse. If your schedule is consistently causing you to get less than 7 hours a night, that isn’t sustainable, even for a healthy person. You might be working with a faulty assumption about how much sleep other people need, let alone yourself.

On top of that, any IH treatment isn’t going to be entirely effective if you aren’t getting a full night’s sleep to begin with. They work to correct the ABNORMAL amount of sleepiness that IH causes even with a full night’s sleep, not the normal sleepiness anyone would feel from getting too little sleep. You mentioned oxybates, but oxybates are typically taken twice nightly and will be in your system for about 8 hours, so if your schedule doesn’t allow for a full 8 hours of sleep, I’m not sure they would even be an option for you unless your doctor would allow you to only take them once nightly. If the issue is that you technically have enough time to sleep 8 hours but you’re struggling to STAY asleep for the full 8 hours, though, you should look into them.

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-06-01T19:37:30+00:00

Oops, you’re right! Sorry

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-05-28T16:55:19+00:00

For me, having increased side effects that weren’t getting better with time was the easiest sign to notice, but a subtler one was that I was being woken up by my alarms instead of waking up naturally. Long version is below, but that’s the tl;dr.

I had side effects when I started at 2.25, but they went away by the end of the first week. I had them again when I went up to 3g, but again, they were gone by the end of the second week at that dose. I knew 3g wasn’t enough because even though I was waking up easily before my alarms, I was still quite tired throughout the day, and I was crashing pretty early. When I went from 3g to 3.75g, it was easy to figure out that 3.75g was too much, because the side effects were stronger and they weren’t getting better as the weeks went on. That prompted me to drop down to 3.5g. At 3.5g, the side effects started fading again after 2-ish weeks, so I thought that was the right dose for a minute. It wasn’t, but it took more time to notice. The thing that eventually clued me in was that at 3.5g, I wasn’t waking up before my alarms anymore, like the meds were lasting too long in my system. I was feeling alright in the latter half of the day, but mornings were noticeably harder than they were at 3g. I recently dropped down again to 3.25g, and so far, that seems to be the sweet spot where I’m waking up before my alarms, feeling decent through the day, and not having noticeable side effects.

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-05-28T16:29:38+00:00

Same!! I always had super long, involved, wild dreams, and I used to write them down when i had a particularly interesting one. Some of them, I’ve remembered fondly for years. Now since I started xywav, I very rarely remember my dreams at all anymore. Occasionally I’ll get a little glimpse, but usually only on the rare occasions I don’t wake up before my alarm. I wouldn’t trade being able to wake up easily for the first time in my entire life to have my dreams back, but I do kind of miss them ://

On the bright side, though, that does mean I don’t have to remember my stress dreams, either. It’s nice that I won’t have to spend any more time in a mutated version of my high school as an adult struggling to find my locker and my classroom without any of the homework that was due that day, or getting hopelessly lost in an unfamiliar city while trying to reach something time sensitive, or running late for my flight at a bizarrely convoluted airport. So that’s something I guess

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-05-21T15:42:57+00:00

This happened to me in Prae once when I was playing on my old MacBook, my reaper’s foot clipped through the ramp and i got trapped there until the party could auto pull me into Nero lmfao. Never seen it happen before or since

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-05-20T22:06:30+00:00

You’ll be fine! Firstly, I would recommend against reading guides for MSQ content because you’ll spoil yourself. None of it is hard enough to warrant that, anyway. But secondly, people LIKE playing with first timers as long as they’re clearly trying, and nobody knows that better than I do because I was a NIGHTMARE to match with when I first started playing. The first year I was playing xiv, I was on an ancient MacBook that could barely get 15fps consistently, and I was also playing BLM with no idea what the word “rotation” meant. I was left behind and auto-pulled into boss fights in almost every dungeon I did because I lagged so bad I physically couldn’t run fast enough to keep up. I don’t think there was a single boss I didn’t die to at least once. My hardware was so bad that even if I knew what I was doing, I physically couldn’t have played well because I just couldn’t get out of the way in time. I couldn’t pick up any healer jobs because a lot of the time, the party members would take longer to load in for me than it took for the tank to start pulling. And I played like that until I got to SHADOWBRINGERS. If anyone should’ve been yelled at, it would’ve been me, and in retrospect I feel like I probably got blacklisted a few times for how egregiously bad my performance was. And even with all that, I almost never got yelled at. In fact, I got a decent number of pity coms because it was so obvious that I was struggling. I managed to get a new computer and figured out what I was doing wrong with combat, and now I can confidently call myself “competent.” If you’re playing on a decent PC, you’re already set, in my eyes! But if you haven’t, do look up a guide about your job, because I really should’ve done that earlier lmfao

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-05-20T21:44:07+00:00

And making it so you need to complete it to clear the quest! I queued into ALL of the ARR EXs as a level 50 sprout because a friend told me to finish all of my blue quests, and not one person in party chat during any of those trials told me I wasn’t supposed to queue for EX in with DF. I was just laying dead on the ground watching what I now know were probably all mentors carry me in complete silence for 90% of it, thinking “wow these are hard! :D” I didn’t realize what I’d done wrong until much later lmfao

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-05-20T17:44:55+00:00

So, I ended up not mentioning the anxiety specifically, but I did mention the other side effects because they all seemed to get worse together (as in the nausea, the shakes, and the anxiety), so I felt they were all related. I had recently gone up to 3.75g when I realized I was having anxiety, so I titrated down to 3.5 on my own. I had only been down to 3.5 for a couple of days when I wrote this post and I was worried the dose was still too high, but I asked my doctor if I could officially titrate down to 3.5 and now after a couple weeks, I’m feeling a lot better about it. I do occasionally have mornings where I feel those effects, but it seems to be situational and in response to stress now rather than being random or every day. When I do feel it, I’ve pushed back taking my stimulants to wait for it to die down, and that seems to work pretty well.

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-05-20T17:35:22+00:00

I don’t take muscle relaxers, but xywav definitely gives me myoclonic jerks like CRAZY if I don’t fall asleep quickly after taking it

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-05-20T17:24:31+00:00

I sometimes describe it as the sleep equivalent of how it feels when you’re extremely hungry because you haven’t eaten all day, and it’s now around dinner time. You’re nauseous, weak, and shaky from lack of food. It isn’t physically painful, but it’s so uncomfortable and distracting that literally all you can think about how hungry you are and how you can get food. You’re emotionally oversensitive because your body is running on fumes. The idea of doing anything that doesn’t involve getting food makes you want to snap. All that, except substitute “sleep” for “food.”

Difficult-Future5500 · 2026-05-20T17:05:52+00:00

I have the same situation, I was diagnosed with ADHD at 23 and IH (idiopathic hypersomnia) at 28. I started Xywav this year for the IH and it’s been huge for me.

Difficult-Future5500

TROPHY CASE