How Does Poor Sleep Rob Vitality And Health?

Recognizing Poor Sleeping Habits

We all know how it feels to have a rough morning. You wake up from your slumber, and it's much easier just to turn over and hit the snooze button. Sometimes it can be a struggle to even open your eyes.

Hopefully, you're one of those people that only feels that way every once in a while, but we understand that many people have significant trouble getting out of bed regularly.

Some people think of it as a form of laziness, but there are a lot of reasons why poor sleeping habits can be chronic and problematic, without it necessarily being some sort of character flaw, as it is so often characterized.

How Did You Feel This Morning?

Think about how it felt to wake up this morning? Was it a struggle to throw off your blankets? What did you do yesterday? Did you spend the afternoon helping your friend move into a new apartment Maybe you were so exhausted that you needed to get a little extra rest to recover?

Or maybe the room was particularly cold, and it felt so wonderful under the blankets that it took every ounce of your resolve to leave your wonderfully warm and comfortable bed. Maybe it was something going on in your head?

We've all had those nights we spent tossing and turning because of anxious thoughts we just couldn't evacuate from our minds. There are perfectly normal reasons why we have trouble sleeping sometimes, but there are many reasons why we sleep poorly that can have a powerful effect on our overall health and well-being.

Sleeping difficulties are a significant problem for many men and women across the country. Many people don't really understand why they have trouble sleeping, but they know it's harming their life.

Specialists spend their entire careers working with patients to help promote healthier rest patterns. In terms of so many aspects of our health, healthy sleep is the lynchpin that helps maintain us in peak condition. The rest of this article will be concerned with various root causes which hurt regular sleeping habits.

Common Sleeping Problems

Not Enough Sleep

This should seem pretty obvious, but if you don't sleep the seven to nine hours your body naturally requires, you will start to slip. Your body goes through a natural sleep cycle, slipping from REM sleep to multiple deep sleep stages.

All these sleep stages are critical and restorative, and if you don't sleep long enough, your body will suffer because you don't spend the necessary amount of time rejuvenating through each phase of sleep. Just restructuring your life to be able to sleep for a whole night can do wonders for your health.

Abnormal Sleeping Patterns

There are a ton of careers out there that don't permit you to establish a normal and healthy sleep pattern. Doctors and nurses work long hours and often are required to flip their entire schedules on a day's notice. Firefighters and EMTs must remain on call for long hours, finding short respites of sleep interrupted by high adrenaline periods of activity. For sleep to be most restorative, your body must adhere to a healthy pattern.

Hormone levels rise and fall throughout the day, controlling hunger, fatigue, and energy levels, and if your schedule is too all over the place, you may find yourself with energy rushing through your veins just when you lay your head down to rest.

Although there is only so much you can do regarding regularizing your sleeping patterns in many cases, make every effort to establish sleeping habits as close to normal as possible.

Atypical Circadian Rhythm

If you have allowed your sleeping habits to get off track, you may have actually hijacked your own Circadian Rhythm. The Circadian Rhythm is naturally optimized for nighttime rest, but if you work the second or third shift, stay out too late with friends, or do anything that causes you to regularly fall asleep at a strange time, your body will actually re-adapt to your new circumstances.

This means that if you get a new 9-5 job or if you otherwise have to wake up at a regular and decent hour, your body will grind its gears, slow to recalibrate to sudden alterations in your sleep schedule.

Bad Sleep Hygiene

There are a lot of things that you do throughout the day that wreck your regular sleeping habits without you even realizing it. Do you watch television in the bedroom? Do you drink caffeine within three hours of bedtime? Do you give in and take a nap in the afternoon? All of these seemingly innocuous decisions can prevent you from getting the most out of your night's rest.

Even having a large dinner or exercising just before bed can negatively impact your resting patterns. As you fall asleep, your muscles relax, and your digestive system slows to a crawl. Falling asleep with a lot in your stomach or right after a long and hard workout can lead to a restless night.

Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Sleep Apnea is a severe medical condition that affects many men and women across the United States.

Sleep Apnea primarily affects obese individuals but can actually be a problem for anyone. Sleep Apnea is a condition caused by anything obstructing your airways as you try to sleep. Minor Sleep Apnea can be as simple as a chronic snore, but for some people, it actually causes them to suffocate for brief periods throughout the night before gasping for fresh air.

Sleep Apnea wreaks havoc upon the body and is one of the leading causes of Testosterone Deficiency in males. It also disrupts Human Growth Hormone production, which can harm the energy levels of both sexes. Even though Sleep Apnea is a severe and potentially chronic condition, multiple effective ways exist to treat and alleviate the disorder.

For obese patients, losing weight is the best way to resolve Sleep Apnea. There are also masks that actively circulate fresh air into the nostrils and mouth, allowing you to get all the oxygen you need to sleep soundly. Surgery is also an available option for patients with severe sleep apnea not directly caused by obesity.

Restless Leg Syndrome

Restless Leg Syndrome is a little-understood medical condition that can harm healthy sleep. The primary symptom of RLS is precisely what it sounds like: during sleep, a patient feels sensations that cause them to compulsively want to move their legs or arms during sleep. The condition is obviously neurological in nature, but researchers have yet to discover a clear cause.

Around one in ten people in the United States suffer from Restless Legs Syndrome. Although doctors don't have a firm idea of why RLS happens, there are ways to ease the symptoms of the condition, such as exercising more often, sleeping more regularly, decreasing caffeine use, or massaging the legs before bed.

Medical Side-Effects

There are many medications that can lead directly to disrupted sleeping habits. A few types of drugs that can disrupt healthy sleep are allergy medications, blood pressure medications, and anti-depressants.

If you are having trouble sleeping, consider what drugs you are currently on, and talk to your doctor about choosing another treatment option or changing the means of taking medication. Some medicines, for example, can disrupt sleep when taken orally, but when delivered directly to the lungs, it has no disruptive effect.

Untreated Psychiatric Issues

Men and women with elevated levels of anxiety or depression are at higher risk of sleeping poorly, which can even exacerbate the primary condition. Psychological conditions tend to make the brain go into overdrive at the worst times, especially when you are alone.

If you are chronically depressed or sad, getting treatment can help you sleep better, and the combination of therapeutic treatment and improved sleeping habits can significantly improve your health and outlook on life.

Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder and Advanced Sleep Phase Disorder

As researchers learn more about conditions related to Circadian Rhythm Disruption, they find that there are underlying biological reasons why their sleeping patterns are different than the norm. Advanced Sleep Phase Disorder and Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder are a few examples of conditions caused by a disruption of the Circadian Rhythm.

ASDP is a condition in which individuals get sleepy very early and tend to wake up earlier than expected. DSPD is caused when individuals have trouble falling asleep until later than usual and wake up later as well.

These conditions are believed to result from a biological clock that is simply out of time with most humans. Although these disorders are often chalked up to poor habits, they can actually be biologically-induced conditions.

These conditions also correlate with an increased risk of severe medical disorders such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Diabetes has also been strongly correlated with an increased risk of sleep apnea.

Sleep Often Troubled by Multiple Issues

Although all of these issues can negatively affect sleep, the problem is that most people who sleep poorly have trouble for multiple reasons. The more sophisticated the views on poor sleep become in the medical community, the more it becomes clear that many issues which have a disruptive effect on sleep are interconnected, and finding the root cause or causes of poor sleep is the most effective way of contributing to a typical night's sleep.

What Can I Do to Sleep Better?

Sleeping well is undeniably essential to living a healthy life. If you are having trouble sleeping well, read through this list of common causes and see which issues apply to you. If your sleeping problems are clearly the result of an underlying medical condition such as sleep apnea or medications you are taking, don't be afraid to talk to a doctor.

If you feel that your sleeping problems are the result of your own taking healthy sleep for granted, the following are some healthy steps to get your sleep patterns back on track:

Make a concerted effort to sleep better- One of the most important things you can do is simply prioritize sleep more highly, making the conscientious choice to sleep better.

Lights Out The healthiest sleep occurs in the darkest of the night. Eliminate all sources of light from your sleeping area. Even cover up your alarm clock.

No Caffeine After 4 pm. Caffeine stays in your system for a notoriously long time. By avoiding caffeine in the early and late evening, you can detox and make it easier to sleep.

Have a Light Dinner A heavy stomach can make sleep very restless. The digestive system works slowly at night, and falling asleep with a full stomach is far from optimal.

No Work or Play in the Bedroom The brain is a complex thing. If you like to watch television, work on your homework, or play on your phone in bed, this can prevent your brain from adequately associating the bedroom with sleep.

Consider Melatonin- If you are in the process of correcting poor sleeping habits, Melatonin can be a valuable tool to recalibrate your system. Only use recommended doses, however, because taking too much can hurt sleep.

For most people, combining these steps will be pretty successful in improving their sleeping habits and their ability to wake up ready for anything. If you still have trouble sleeping even after taking these proactive measures, your doctor can work with you to uncover any underlying conditions which may be impacting your sleep.

If All Else Fails, Talk to Your Doctor!

Remember: There is no reason to resign yourself to a lifetime of poor sleep. You will age faster, be less productive, and ultimately be less happy. Take the necessary steps to optimize your sleep to the necessities of your life, and your body and mind will thank you for it in the long run.

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