Previously whilst on a high carbohydrate diet (total carb addicted) my husband would tell everyone that if there was an Olympic medal for sleep, Iād win Gold every time.
Now, almost one week religiously sticking to the Keto WOE Iām struggling to sleep.
In this normal? If so, when does it usually pass?
Chezza 
Are you having trouble going to sleep, or are you waking up too early?
Initially, I was sleeping a lot less too - but waking up rested and before my alarm went off. Now, a year and a half into Keto - I am back to normal sleep, but feeling 5x better overall
Main thing is that you feel fully rested.
Iām struggling to fall asleep with any little sound disturbing me, then I feel like Iām not sleeping. Resting for sure but not the deep sleep Iām used to. Always used to take me about an hour to be fully roused before, now Iām alert quite quickly.
Iām currently on 7am starts but I do have both nights shifts and day shifts within the same rota, the switch is horrendous.
I donāt feel well rested. Just hoping this passes and is normal for getting fat adapted.
Shift work sucks for sleep. I do it too
While others will weigh in, all I can say is well into Keto, I am getting great sleep and feeling energetic upon rising. Hope your sitch improves with time
I have read books and books on this subject. I have been a chronic insomniac.
The following made the biggest differences for me:
#4 Explained:
Normally, you need to get to sleep. You lay down, and your brain spins up. Starts going through everything you have to do, might have forgotten, etc. Then any noise, or anything that stops you from sleeping PISSES YOU OFF. Then you canāt sleep for sure.
When you do fall asleep, you are literally dreaming about not sleeping well, or having more of a lucid dream where you are on control. (This was me, for decades)
So, this is much simpler. Spend the last hour with the lights turned down, screens off, paper an pencil and make your notes of anything you might be forgetting. (I no longer have to do this as I do it in real time with an app on my phone). review your calendar for the week. Make your notes. Done. Relax.
When you go to bed, lay down, and do EITHER:
A) Meditation. Practice meditating. You will either meditate or fall asleep trying. The easiest is to repeat a single word (love, kindness, health) as you exhale, and SIMPLY ignore/let go of any thoughts that enter your mind on your inhale. Get back to your word. When you find you have slipped, SMILE and repeat your word (itās working).
B) Pilot Relaxation. Pilots learn to sleep anywhere quickly. They close their eyes, focus on one part of their body. Left hand: Feel it relax. Command it to relax, and when they feel all the tension leave, the do the other side. Then the forearm, etc. etc. Then the feet, ankles, shins, working towards their center. This one is great. The first 3 times you do it, it seems to take forever. I have had to do my whole body twice. Then something magical happened. My body LINKED this process up to sleeping and relaxing. It got faster and faster every night after that.
Now, I lay down, and I am quickly asleep in 5 minutes. I use a garmin device, and it is recording up to 4hrs of DEEP sleep every night! I used to get about 1hr and wake up feeling horrible. Now I wake up earlier without an alarm clock.
I truly hope this helps!
@CaptainKirk. Thatās really useful, thank you. I already do everything except avoid eating before bed and bedtime meditation. Didnāt realise eating could make such a difference. I shall try this from tonight and see if it helps.
As for meditation, goodness knows why I didnāt think of this myself as itās something I have done before when feeling uber stressed.
Again, thank you.
I donāt eat for like 6 hours before bed. If I do I have a big chance of getting reflux which definitely keeps me awake. I sleep much sounder on an empty stomach. I still only average 6 hrs on good night. Stressing over lost sleep makes it worse. When you find yourself unable to sleep try to get into a state of deep relaxation at least. Effective meditation is the next best thing to actually sleeping and will still have many of the benefits of sleep. But worrying about not being able to sleep is worse. If I find myself unable to sleep I read. About the lights, you really only need to worry about fluorescent lights and blue light (cell phone, TV and computer screen lights) before sleeping. An incandescent or led light and a good old fashioned book are just fine and make me sleepy. Also I read on my kindle with the blue filter turned on sometimes. Doesnāt seem to be a problem. But just laying in bed for hours doesnāt work for me. If I donāt fall asleep in an hour I get up until I am ready to pass out. 
I struggled with being able to fall asleep big time when I started, also had crazy vibrant nightmares almost every single night. I wasnāt eating close to bedtime at all. I also was getting up at least several times per night to empty my bladder (which was super weird as I wasnāt even dropping water weight). Finally between 2 mo and 3 mo everything settled down and now as long as I am not having restless leg sensations I can fall asleep, no more nightmares past month at least, and I feel more rested in the morning 
I think I took much longer for most to get past the temporary sleep disturbances!
I had trouble in the beginning also. I would say within one month I was sleeping again and this new sleep wasnāt interrupted by diuresis throughout the night anymore. (As a carb eater I awoke every two hours to urinate.)
I will say I canāt sleep for fun anymore. No more afternoon naps because Iām bored or itās rainy and I just want to kill a few hours with a nice nap. Nope. And I also donāt sleep in or generally need more than 7-8 hours of sleep these days. In my carb days I could sleep for 12 hours on the weekends.
If I am having trouble falling asleep and I had an early dinner sometimes having a small amount of full fat yogurt fills my tummy and helps me fall asleep.
@BeStill. Thank you for replying. Iāve been having lots of intense dreams too.
@PetaMarie - Iām still having naps so hopefully that will get better too. I feel so guilty when I nap as I feel I should be doing something productive.
I restricted eating last night. Although sleep was broken several times with toilet breaks for myself and elderly dog (she has a urine infection), I do feel the sleep I had was better quality.
Up for work now and definitely feel better than I did yesterday 
@Chezza consider getting one of those fancy watches that track sleep quality.
This is great to get a baseline, and an understanding of the quality of sleep you are getting, and your waking routine.
Getting up 4 times a night isnāt as bad as you think. I getup 2-3 times, but itās usually at the end of a deep sleep cycle, I get up and pee, then back to bed and asleep shortly there after. (Thatās the magic). Itās comforting to see my total hours of deep sleep has really climbed since changing to Keto!
@CaptainKirk Now thereās a good idea . I feel a treat coming on. Definitely slept better last night too. Still knackered but had a couple of busy shifts at work so to be expected.
Magnesium at bedtime helps meā¦ as do blue-blocking orange glasses. I have a reminder on phone to put them on at 6:30 
I bought some magnesium too and it definitely helped. Feel like Iām sleeping too much now 
I do the magnesium in my drink of water before getting ready for bed. It does seem to relax me and put me more into a mode of going to sleep. Plus, I like having that little bit extra of magnesium.
Iāve noticed that if we do push the time later for supper and we have a big supper it will interfere with my going to sleep and sleeping well the first part of the night. Weāll do supper anytime between about 3:00pm and maybe 7:00pm. 5:30pm or so is typical but when it goes much past that, Iāll notice the sleep is not as good. Iām sure it will vary with people as we all probably eat differently. But thatās what Iāve noted for myself.
Good luck! Sometimes it does take a few months for stuff to get worked outā¦ hungry, not hungry, not sleeping, sleeping well, bathroom stuffā¦ Hang in there.
Edited to add: I suppose it would give a little perspectiveā¦ we usually go to bed around 9:30 pm - 10:00 pm. So if we finished eating at 6:00 pm, that gives about 4 hours between eating our big meal and bedtime. More is never a problem. Less, maybe a little, and eating way later, like 7:00pm or 8:00 pm (rarely happens) means that either we stay up later or we donāt sleep as well. Donāt mean to be longwindedā¦ just in case anyone wonderedā¦
Iām only 12 days in so hopefully everything will settle down. Feeling incredibly tired at the moment though. Supplementing too so that shouldnāt be the problem. Small price to pay if I can repair decades of damage through damaging foods.
Iāve been doing āarchetype meditationsā that often work with my subconscious about my body, for a few decades. Iāve had some amazing insights and results with it.
Anyway, I went through one cycle where I was having major problems sleeping, accompanied by worry. It didnāt matter about what. It was less like there was a thing that made me think of it, as that I was going to sort of obsessively think about something ā anything, whatever happened to be in my life. While not sleeping. It was driving me crazy.
I had asked for a dream to explain this to me, but as I was finally falling asleep (not there yet) I heard a voice (like a voice in a dream) say, āWhen they are stressed, you are stressed.ā and I understood it meant my kidneys.
WTH?? I was baffled. What on earth do my kidneys have to do with anything??
But I had been keeping a journal for a couple months that included my sleep times, including tried-to-sleep-and-couldnāt notes, including my diuretic doses, sometimes even including my urinary frequency and what I believed was water (not fat/lbm) weights.
This was not super clear, but when I went through it, looking carefully, I noticed that in fact, there DID seem to be a correlation ā which apparently my subconscious had noticed ā between when my kidneys would be under more stress and my attempts to sleep had canāt-stop-thinking until exhaustion. In fact in several areas I even had some kidney slight aches, and it was fairly severe in those cases.
This is only one person and anecdotal of course, but now, when I am feeling that problem, I make sure that I am drinking enough clear water, and not doing stuff that stresses the kidneys TOO much. The adrenal glands sit on top of the kidneys, and thatās what caffeine (and other diuretics) stimulate. They control the sodium balance in the body. Diuretics of several kinds work by stimulating the adrenals which in turn dump some sodium which in turn dumps water, which the kidneys have to process.
It might not always be that caffeine is keeping one awake (though it can! Or some people can drink coffee right before bed, go figure!) as that too much stimulus to the adrenal glands may cause a degree of stress on the kidneys ā or, that too little water needed for cleanly āwashing outā the body is present.
(Water intake needs to accompany body-water loss, as body-water contains proteins, itās not the same as what we call water ā body once told me this. Although a couple years of being bedridden from a heart condition with massive edema making me an immobile whale with high pressure against the skin from inside, taught that lesson. The water-edema it creates, if it soaks a towel for example, seems to never dry. Itās bizarre.)
When people shift to keto they drop a lot of water, very fast, which is suddenly greater stress on the kidneys. If my body/subconscious is correct about kidney stress being correlated with pre-sleep mental-āspinā as I call it, then making sure you have enough SODIUM ā so the water loss might be slightly slower ā and not very much stimulate the adrenals (totally without regard to caffeine itself, just focusing on adrenal-hence-kidney stress) ā might help.
Or not. Just an experimental suggestion.
I drink some Twinings Herbal Tea:
Camomile, Honey and Vanilla in the evening before bed. I donāt add anything to it, but it has a lovely flavour.
So much useful in insight here, thank you. Reading this and realised I started to have kidney pain today after yesterdayās relatively healthy and clean eating. Last thing I had was a quark with a bit of vanilla sugar and cinnamon and saffron. I didn;t have this pain for weeks, only if I overdid it with wrong type of salt sometimes before. I wonder if it is the protein that my body does not take well. I had other type of protein prior to that, for dinner - 2 scrambled eggs with mushrooms.