Care For Your Sleep

Many of us are very well-familiar with a wide range of negative effects of insomnia. Those include a terrible feeling of fatigue and restlessness, body aches, headaches, drastically reduced energy levels, slowed down mental functions, lack of attention and inability to focus, resulting in decreased performance and lack of success in daily life, mood swings, irritability, depression and other emotional problems, as well as many many more, depending on personal factors and personality type of every one of us. This reactions we all experience after sleepless nights can affect our entire life to a great extent.

To make the situation worse, nowadays, the specialists could add one more negative effect of a lack of sleep, which is paranoid thoughts. Nice isn’t it? Just like we were lacking problems and bad reactions of our body on chronic insomnia. This week, Dr Daniel Freeman from the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London presented the findings of his new research at the Cheltenham Science Festival. He told that insomnia is linked to developing a stable feeling that other people are trying to cause harm or control us. In other words, chronic insomnia is linked to paranoid thoughts and unjustified  fears of being harmed by other people.

According to a research, carried out by a group of British specialists leaded by Dr. Freeman,  which involved 8,580 adults, those who experience constant lack of sleep reported that within only a month or two their mental condition has worsened, and they have fears that people around tend to harm them. Such paranoid thoughts were registered in about 21% of the participants who suffered constant insomnia, and 9% or them reported that they’d believed in the existing control over their thoughts by outside forces. In addition, 1,5% of chronic insomniacs said that their feelings of anticipating a potential serious harm from other people were sometimes really disturbing.

If you suspect that you might be suffering from insomnia, you should analyze your sleep routine and answer the following questions:

1. Do you have difficulties with falling asleep or maintaining good sleep all night long?
2. Do you usually wake up very early in the morning?
3. Do you feel tired, unrefreshed and restless when you wake up?
4. Do you experience all of these problems even in those situations, when you have an opportunity to go to bed in the most convenient time and sleep as much as you want?
5. If you suspect insomnia in your child, does he refuse going to bed and sleeping alone?
6. Do you have at least one of the following problems:
— lack of energy;
— lack of motivation to do something;
— problems with attention, memory or abilities to concentrate;
— lack of success at work or in school;
— frequent changes of the mood;
— daytime sleepiness;
— frequent mistakes when doing usual daily work or when driving;
— nervous tension, headache and abdominal pains;
— disappointment or worries about own sleep?

If you answered “YES” to all of these questions, there is a big probability that you are suffering from insomnia. In such case, it is very important to find out, whether you have some other reasons causing you problems with sleep. Sleep disturbances and disorders can be the result of various reasons including:
— Chronic medical conditions and neurological complications;
— Long-term use of some medications;
— Substance abuse;
— A psychological disorder;
— Another sleep disorder or disturbance, etc.

If you suffer from insomnia, you are not alone with this problem. Nowadays, more than 30% of people around the world regularly have the symptoms of temporary insomnia, and about 10% of modern Americans suffer from chronic insomnia. Insomnia occurs more frequently in women and aged people. It is usually caused by a variety of reasons, including some serious general diseases. Also, insomnia can be a side effect of taking certain medications. People, who suffer from insomnia, usually have such problems as daytime irritability and fatigue, difficulties with concentration and focusing on something, sleepiness and many others.

There are four main types of insomnia that are connected with:
- difficulties when falling asleep;
- difficulties with maintaining sleep all night long;
- waking up too early;
- unsatisfying quality of sleep.

Insomnia is caused by some quite common reasons, which can be classified as the following:
(1) the causes, connected with physical and psychological condition of a person (including stresses, worries, anxiety and fears, concerns about the problems in professional or personal life, inability to relax, suffering from pains or diseases, menopause, continuous boredom and feeling of being rejected, depression, and so on);
(2) using stimulants, medications containing caffeine and other medications that can interfere with sleep (antidepressants, antihistamines, some weight-loss medications, etc.);
(3) environmental factors (changes in sleep environment, changes in daily habits or schedules, changes connected with traveling and time zone change, etc.)
(4) the factors, connected with aging (changes in general health, daily routine, sleep patterns, and so on);
(5) behavioral factors and failures to maintain a proper sleep hygiene (eating too much before going to sleep, leading very active night life, drinking and smoking before going to sleep, and so on).

If ignored and not treated properly, insomnia can lead to some complications, such as psychological disorders, depression, problems with blood pressure, increased severity of other illnesses and diseases. Besides, as insomnia usually causes lack of attention and concentration, it can be a reason of serious mistakes and even accidents which put human life to danger. Do not delay talking to a specialist if you are experiencing syndromes of insomnia and have sleep deprivation affecting the quality of your life. In the majority of the situations, insomnia can be treated with special supplements and medications (sleeping pills or antidepressants) as well as behavioral therapy, supported by the efforts to eliminate possible causes of insomnia and developing good sleep habits.

Now, we are living in the epoch when good and comfortable sleep became one of the main pleasures in our life. At the same time, overwhelming majority of people who live and work in modern metropolises can not benefit from this pleasure anymore. Our fast life easily turns “larks” into “owls”. Every evening we stay awake till deep night, trying to finish some urgent work, chatting with friends online or watching Conan O’Brien and other late night TV shows. Every morning we try to convince our mind to wake up and make the body move, but there is no feeling that our organism have had some rest and got some refreshment. We go to work or to school, and it usually takes hours to pull ourselves together and collect some energy to go on with our daily routine.

For many of desperate office workers and college students, an opportunity to have some normal sleep in the week-ends is the last hope in their search for physical and mental relief. However, the results of recent researches, publicized by British specialists from National Academy of Science, demonstrated that it is impossible to compensate lack of normal sleep in the week-ends. First of all, as our natural biorhythms are being constantly neglected, it is hard for a real night person to fall asleep early on Fridays or Saturdays. Second, even when we finally reach our beds after a hard working week, long-awaited sleep does not help us to have good rest and renew our dried out energy resources. And, after all, on Monday everything starts all over again.

Besides, it is a mistake to think that such problem as sleep disorders concerns only businessmen and hardworking students. In our times, many people who are not bound by office schedules and regular psychological pressures of hard studies, who lead a slow and ordered life – they frequently suffer from insomnia, sleep apnea and other sleep disorders. By various reasons, many of us sometimes can not have good sleep at night, toss and turn to the left and to the right in the bed and look at the clock waiting for morning to come. Many people regularly see nightmares which, certainly, do not make their sleep more pleasant and effective. The result of all these problems is the same: we can not have proper rest at night and in the morning we feel like zombies.

Scientists do not stop raising the alarm: just several decades ago people used to sleep minimum eight hours a day, but nowadays, daily sleep of an average person lasts no longer than six hours. We all have to remember that sleep deprivation, sleep disturbances and disorders result in increased risks of cardiovascular disease, premature ageing and overweight. Besides, regular lack of normal sleep brings to degradation of memory, depression and other psychological problems. It is not worth mentioning that lack of sleep makes us weaker, less creative and efficient at work, less successful in our professional and private life, as well as makes us feel less comfortable and less happy. So – let’s take care about our sleep, for our own good!