Insomnia. We’ve all been there, tossing and turning, watching the night hours pass by into the early hours of the morning while we’re aching for the sweet release of sleep. When the birds start singing outside, and your clock is nearing the time your alarm is set, you know you’re in for a rough day. For those who suffer with insomnia chronically, which is 10% of the adult population, it can cause major disruptions to their lives. Keep reading to discover tips for overcoming insomnia.
Getting a regular good night’s sleep has a significant impact on our overall health and wellbeing. If you are chronically sleep deprived, you make decisions less effectively, you are less creative, and you are at higher risk of coronary heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and obesity. Studies even show that getting less than 7 or more than 8.5 hours of sleep per night has a direct effect on life expectancy and likelihood of chronic disease.
But have no fear, lack of sleep is mostly treatable by changing our lifestyle habits and working on our sleep health, or failing this, medication. Keep on reading to find out the main causes of insomnia, its symptoms, and tips for overcoming insomnia.
Understanding Insomnia
Insomnia is when you have trouble getting to sleep. This can be either getting to sleep initially or maintaining sleep, meaning that you are waking up in the night. If this happens on a regular basis, it can cause issues the following day which impact our ability to function as we normally would.
Insomnia can be:
- ·Acute – Insomnia is described as acute when it occurs at least 3 days per week, and lasts between 1 week and 3 months.
- Chronic – Insomnia occurs 3 or more days a week, lasting 3 months or more.
The impact of not getting enough sleep Consistently not getting enough sleep can cause havoc in our daily lives and on our health and wellbeing. Sleep deprivation can cause impaired perception, memory, difficulty concentrating, slower reactions, visual disturbances, and periods of microsleep (a period of sleep lasting seconds, which we are often unaware of). This can affect our functioning at work, for example, causing us to doze at our desks or make embarrassing errors.
Lack of sleep also influences our emotional responses, increases our stress and irritability, and impairs our ability to relate to others. This can lead our small at-work blunders to send our spirits into despair, or for us to misinterpret the signs of an innocent interaction as a threat.
Being sleep deprived for one night is comparable to the effects of having a blood alcohol concentration of 0.10%, a level where impairment is obvious and speech may be slurred. This makes it a dangerous level of impairment to drive with, as it is akin to being drunk. In addition to this, the potential for phases of microsleep occurring makes driving while sleep deprived very dangerous. Driving while drowsy accounts for 100,000 crashes each year.
Not only does lack of sleep affect our daily functioning, but it can also have a detrimental effect on our long-term health prospects too. It changes the way our immune system responds and makes us more susceptible to chronic disease, obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Getting less than the recommended amount of sleep has been linked in studies to a reduced life expectancy, so prioritising our sleep health is essential when considering our overall health and wellbeing. This article contains some tips for overcoming insomnia which will hopefully help you improve and maintain a healthy sleep-life.
Symptoms of insomnia
If you have insomnia, you may experience:
- Difficulty falling asleep
- Frequent awakenings during the night
- Waking up too early and being unable to fall asleep
- Daytime fatigue, irritability and difficulty concentrating
- Impaired performance at work or school
Seeking advice from a medical healthcare professional if you are going through these symptoms can help by giving you tips for overcoming insomnia.
Healthy sleep habits and lifestyle changes
What are some tips for overcoming insomnia? This may not come as a surprise, but practising good sleep hygiene means establishing a regular sleep routine. This means working with our body’s natural circadian rhythm to give us the best chance of getting a good night’s sleep.
Some tips for overcoming insomnia are:
- Establish a regular sleep schedule – Going to sleep and waking up at the same time each night is just as important as getting enough sleep. Most adults need 7 or more hours of quality sleep a night. Find a time to go to sleep that works for you and stick to it. A useful tip is to set a reminder on your phone for your chosen bed time, to help you remember that you need to wind down.
- Make sure your sleep environment is sleep friendly – Have you ever crashed with the TV and lights on and woken up at 3:00am wondering why you’re still in your jeans and your teeth aren’t brushed? Noise from the TV, light and not getting ready for bed are stopping you from getting a good sleep. Your sleep environment needs to feel comfortable, safe, dark and quiet enough for you to get the beauty sleep that you need.
- Limiting our blue light exposure before bedtime – Our screens permeate our everyday lives, but they emit blue light which is harmful to our circadian rhythm when we watch screens at night time. This is because it can trick our brains into thinking it is still day. It is recommended to ditch the screens at least 30 minutes before you plan on sleeping. Switch to a relaxing, screen-free activity instead, such as reading.
- ·Regular exercise has been found to help with getting a better-quality sleep.
- Limiting caffeine, nicotine and alcohol before bed time – These have stimulant effects. Drinking alcohol may relax you initially, but it has been shown to disrupt the second half of our sleep cycle (REM), leading to a poorer quality night’s sleep.
Medical Interventions and Treatment options
If you have tried adjusting your lifestyle factors including these tips for overcoming insomnia to no avail, you may be suffering from chronic insomnia, and need medical intervention. Visiting your GP or pharmacy for some professional healthcare advice is a good idea so you can be advised correctly on your next steps.
Some treatment options:
- Prescription medication such as Melatonin, or Zopiclone. These will only be prescribed on a short term basis, and are rarely prescribed due to their potential side effects. Antihistamines, such as Diphenhydramine Hydrochloride, which you can buy from your pharmacy, can also make you drowsy and help you sleep. For more information on the risks and benefits of sleeping pills, click here.
- Cognitive behavioural therapy – This type of therapy can help change your thoughts and behaviours that are keeping you from sleeping.
Home treatments
Here are some tips for overcoming insomnia that you can try at home:
- Stress relieving plants – Having plants and greenery around our house can help relieve stress, which in turn can help us get a better night’s sleep.
- Herbs and supplements – You may be able to find some herbs and supplements that aid sleep, such as lavender, valerian or chamomile.
Having insomnia (difficulty getting to or maintaining sleep) can be debilitating in our daily lives and have detrimental effects on our long-term health. Sleeping is important for so many functions in our bodies and brains, so is worth prioritising for our overall health and wellbeing. Most bouts of insomnia can be remedied by improving our lifestyle and sleep habits, such as creating an environment before bed that assists us to slip away into slumber, or turning off our devices an hour before bed. If these tips for overcoming insomnia do not work, it is well-worth seeking professional advice, such as through using our Ask a Pharmacist service, which is free and confidential.
Sources
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/insomnia/
http://oldwww.imp.lodz.pl/upload/oficyna/artykuly/pdf/full/2010/1_Orzel.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4341978/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0741832914201157
