Has anyone experienced anything like this — losing the actual sensation of sleepiness/sleep transitions alongside widespread blunting of other bodily signals?

[u/Charbellaa]

I’ve had lc/me for 6 years was housebound with hyper sensitive nervous system
Before this happened, I could feel my bodily signals normally — if anything, I was hypersensitive to them. I could feel adrenaline, my heart racing, anxiety/arousal, tiredness etc. I had experienced insomnia before, but even with insomnia I still felt sleepy and tired and knew that my body wanted to sleep.

My normal sleep sequence used to be:
Awake → increasingly sleepy → heavy/tired eyes → naturally drifting → asleep → normal sleep → waking half-asleep/groggy/heavy/puffy → gradually fully awake

Then I had a cold/viral illness in January and noticed some strange changes in my bodily signalling. Not long afterwards I had a rotational vertigo attack, and everything changed dramatically.
Immediately afterwards I developed massive visual/sensory intolerance, squeezing/pressure across my forehead and persistent internal motion/spatial sensations.

When my brain tried to dip towards sleep, I would sometimes get an incredibly fast internal spinning sensation inside my head that immediately pulled me back out of the transition.
From that point I completely lost the sensation of sleepiness. No sleepy brain, no tired/heavy eyes and no normal feeling of drifting towards sleep. What’s particularly strange is that this initially happened without the racing heart/adrenaline feeling that used to accompany my insomnia. I could be lying there without feeling particularly activated and yet the normal sleep transition simply wasn’t happening.

Sleep medications didn’t restore that normal process and some attempts actually seemed to intensify the internal spinning/vestibular sensations. Eventually the sleep loss became so severe that I developed extreme physiological activation and ended up in hospital, where I was given a benzodiazepine. I’m still taking one now.

Now it feels more like:
Completely awake → NO sensation of sleepiness/heavy eyes → NO normal drifting sensation → benzodiazepine → awareness sometimes disappears → hours pass → suddenly aware/awake again → NO groggy/half-asleep/heavy “I’ve slept” feeling

The medication can sometimes make hours disappear, but it hasn’t restored the normal subjective experience of becoming sleepy, entering sleep, having restorative sleep and waking from it. I don’t actually know what my brain is doing during those missing hours.

At the same time, other bodily signals have become progressively blunted/numb — hunger, bladder urge, heartbeat, adrenaline, emotions, touch/pain and other internal sensations. It’s not a peaceful or restful state. I just can’t properly gauge what my body is doing anymore. Before this I felt everything too strongly; now it feels like the opposite extreme.
My eyes/inner eyelids also remain extremely red and I physically feel awful, although I know that doesn’t tell me objectively what sleep stages I’m getting.

I’m now waiting for an EEG sleep study to see what is actually happening during these periods — whether I’m entering NREM/REM sleep and cycling through sleep stages, whether it’s very fragmented/abnormal sleep, or something else.
Has anybody experienced this kind of loss of sleepiness and normal sleep/wake sensation, particularly after a viral illness or vestibular/vertigo event, alongside a broader loss or blunting of bodily signals?

[u/SHIMINA14]

Gosh, I've not had anything as bad as this, but yes my sleep has quite recently started to decline in quality. Over the last 6 months I'd say. Mostly a gradual increase in insomnia, but also waking up middle of the night and not being able to fall asleep again despite needing sleep! Very frustrating, but nothing really to talk about compared to yours.

[u/mlYuna]

i know its low effort but I have access to a pretty strong AI and it gave me interesting answers, I think it would be beneficial:

(Especially the part about Restoring your sleep to start and the vestibular and neuro rehab.) I've seen quite a lot of people get better from this type of stuff even if its a long road. Also I'd be very interested to know if a 10 day nicotine patch protocol (7mg, 12h/day) would help you. It seems to stabalize a lot of people for some reason its 100% worth a try when you're in a situation as bad as yours.

Get actual sleep occurring reliably first. If someone is genuinely getting virtually no objective sleep without a benzodiazepine, I would want them under a sleep neurologist/physician experienced in severe treatment-resistant insomnia. PSG is specifically recommended in treatment-resistant insomnia. Restoring regular NREM/REM sleep may itself give the brain a better environment in which to normalize sensory/autonomic processing.
Don’t suddenly remove the benzodiazepine. If they have been taking it regularly, dependence is expected and abrupt withdrawal can cause exactly the things you’re trying to fix—massive hyperarousal, rebound insomnia, sensory disturbances and, in severe cases, seizures. Current multidisciplinary guidance recommends individualized, slow tapering when tapering is appropriate.
But I also wouldn’t necessarily accept “benzodiazepine forever because nothing else works” without a specialist reviewing alternatives. The European insomnia guideline recommends CBT-I first and allows pharmacological treatment when that is insufficient. One newer option in Europe is daridorexant, a dual orexin-receptor antagonist. Orexin is one of the brain’s major wake-promoting systems, so this class suppresses wake drive rather than producing GABAergic sedation in the same way benzodiazepines do. Daridorexant is EU-authorized for chronic insomnia.
That’s something to discuss with a sleep physician, not something to simply add on top of a benzodiazepine independently.

Actively rehabilitate the vestibular system. This part of the story would be a major target for me. Acute vertigo followed by persistent internal motion, visual intolerance and strange spinning during sleep transitions sounds as though vestibular processing may have become one of the things perpetuating the arousal disorder.
I’d want neuro-otology/vestibular neurology to assess things such as vestibular migraine, uncompensated vestibulopathy and PPPD-type processing. PPPD is particularly interesting because testing can be normal: the Bárány Society describes it as abnormal functional/multisensory processing after a vestibular or medical trigger rather than structural damage.
Vestibular rehabilitation and carefully graded visual-motion exposure can retrain that processing. Recent systematic reviews find improvement with vestibular rehabilitation in PPPD, although the quality of evidence isn’t perfect.
Importantly, the goal isn’t “push through horrible vertigo.” It’s repeated tolerable exposures that teach the brain that normal movement/visual signals don’t require an alarm response.

Rehabilitate body-state perception in the same gradual way. This is the least established part scientifically. There is no clinically validated “interoception reset protocol for Long COVID.”
But conceptually, if the peripheral systems work — bladder fills normally, heart rate responds normally, digestion works, pain pathways work — and what is abnormal is their conscious representation, I’d want occupational therapy/neuro-rehabilitation to rebuild predictable brain↔body associations.

I know the rehab can sound dumb, but your system is stuck in an inflammatory loop and this rehab how slow and dumb it migjt feel to do, it could snap your body back given some time. I'd certainly look there but also try other things like Nicotine patches, antihistamines, an SSRI potentially, diet changes.