How to Get a Good Night’s Rest When Fighting Sleeplessness
We all hear about the dangers of lack of sleep. Arianna Huffington, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Verizon-owned HuffPost (formerly Huffington Post) wrote a 2017 The New York Times best-selling book about the topic of sleep entitled, The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time.
In The Sleep Revolution, Huffington explains that there is a “sleep deprivation crisis” as she calls it happening in the United States and abroad. And, this crisis is affecting our health and wellness, our economy, and loved ones around us.
More precarious are those who suffer from insomnia, a sleep disorder characterized by the lack of ability or difficulty to fall or stay asleep. According to a United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2014 study, 35.2% of US adults get less than seven hours of sleep per day, which is unhealthy for most people.
In this week’s installment, I write about what insomnia is, what are some of the common causes of insomnia, and techniques to combat insomnia for a good night’s rest.
Insomnia, an Overview
As stated, insomnia is a sleep disorder. Its main symptoms include:
- Trouble falling and staying asleep;
- Waking up frequently throughout the night and difficulty going back to sleep;
- Rising too early in the morning; and,
- Fatigue when you wake up in the morning.
Insomnia comes in four variations: primary, secondary, acute, and chronic. And, all of these forms of insomnia should be diagnosed by a medical professional.
Primary insomnia is diagnosed when your sleep challenges are not related with any known medical problem or condition. Whereas, secondary insomnia is when it’s caused by some other condition, such as arthritis, asthma, cancer, depression, medication use, pain, or substance use/abuse.
Acute and chronic insomnia has to do with the length of the period that the insomnia happens. In acute insomnia, it is short-term (from one night to many weeks) and last for periods of time and then ceases for the person. And for chronic insomnia, unfortunately, it lasts for at least a few nights per week for longer than a few months. It’s the persistent and ongoing form of sleeplessness.
So, you can have primary-acute, secondary-acute, primary-chronic and secondary-chronic forms of insomnia, which are caused by many common factors.
Common Causes of Insomnia
When insomnia strikes, it’s important to understand the most common causes so that you can start to eliminate them from your life, if possible, and bring back restful sleep.
Acute insomnia causes consist mainly of:
- a traumatic life event/stressor (such as demotion/termination at work, death in the family or close relationship, or end of a significant relationship);
- Factors in the home that impacts sleep, such as cold/heat temperature, lighting or sound stressors that keeps one awake;
- Distress from emotional or physical challenges;
- Medications that trouble your sleep patterns; and
- Significant changes to your normative circadian/metabolic schedule (caused by travel, changing work shifts, caring for a newborn infant, etc.).
Chronic insomnia consists mostly from:
- Anxiety, depression and related mental health issues/symptoms;
- Chronic stressors; and
- Persistent discomfort or pain during evening hours when trying to sleep.
While it may seem plentiful, the ways you combat sleeplessness are also bountiful and varied. With experimentation, you can find the right techniques to hit snooze on insomnia so you can get a good night’s rest.
How To Get Your Sleep On!
To tackle insomnia for now, or for good, you need to attack the disorder from both biological and emotional directions. Here are some well-known techniques for getting to sleep.
Your body gets ready to sleep by releasing melatonin from the pineal gland into your bloodstream. This triggers your brain to know that, when the sun lowers and your metabolism drops, it is time to start to go to sleep. Insomniacs sometimes have problems with that biological process triggering. These circadian rhythm breakers can be mended by trying a combination of the following:
- Go to bed when you feel tired. It made sound simple, but don’t stay up to watch your favorite Netflix/TV show. Shut down and head straight to bed as soon as you feel any sleepiness in the evening. This will teach your body that you won’t overstimulate and will go to bed when it’s ready.
- Something that may help is turning off those screens (computers, TVs, smartphones) well before bedtime; at least two hours, so that your pineal gland can produce enough melatonin to trigger sleep on time and in the right amount.
- Too much stimulation, like a heated or exciting phone conversation or email/SMS/other messaging, can flood the body with chemicals that outweigh melatonin production and stymy your sleep trigger.
- Exercise sometime throughout the day. 30 minutes of regular, elevated activity (for example, fast walking around the neighborhood) moves blood around the body in a way that has been shown to help with sleep. There is debate over whether doing this too close before bedtime can compete with sleep, so complete this activity at least three hours before then for safe measure.
- Also, drink herbal tea at least three hours (and make it more like six hours) before bedtime so that, again, you are not messing with your melatonin levels to announce it’s sleep time when your body is ready.
When a traumatic event happens, or even small stressors that pile up over time, this can have an emotional toll on our conscious and unconscious, which keeps us wound up when we should be winding down for sleep. To deal with those emotional insomnia issues, try testing these mental techniques:
- Mindfulness is something that I talk about often with clients, and there’s a reason for that. It works! Set aside a five to ten minutes at the end of your day to take deep breaths into your stomach (expanding your diaphragm, not your chest). This can help remove toxins in your blood, and reduce the emotional impact of the day giving way to space for slumber.
- Spend quality time with loved ones and personal friends for better sleep. This time is active, and connecting with others establishes a social buffer to many of life’s issues. In turn, this sets you up for better sleep quality.
- Journal your worries away. Writing before bedtime can help you access your worries, within reason, to get some of the most troubling worries (even pain or discomfort you may be feeling) out of your head and onto paper, or digital. When you do, set aside judgment of yourself and the issues; capture just to get them anchored somewhere outside yourself so your mind doesn’t need to work on those issues in your conscious. That leaves your unconscious to work on them while you’re sleeping, and frequently you’ll find that you can drift off to dreamland more easily.
- This bears repeating, but technology can not only cause biological problems with our sleep, it can tamper with our emotions when trying to combat insomnia. Try moving your smartphone out of the bedroom at night and see if the disconnect from the problems associated with the world tied to your digital devices helps you sleep better.
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While Arianna Huffington’s The Sleep Revolution isn’t a clinical thesis it’s an alarm bell that is helping popular culture understand the importance of how sleeplessness is affecting large populations at home and abroad. If we can all do our part to sleep better, even when insomnia strikes, we can increase happiness, productivity and our relationships.
Do you struggle with sleep? Have you struggled with insomnia in the past? What have you learned that overcame sleeplessness? Let me know in the comments!