Stimulants such as caffeine or certain medications can keep you up. Distractions such as electronics—especially the light from TVs, cell phones, tablets and e-readers—can prevent you from falling asleep.
As people get older, they may not get enough sleep because of illness, medications or sleep disorders. By some estimates, about 70 million Americans of all ages suffer from chronic sleep problems. The 2 most common sleep disorders are insomnia and sleep apnea. People with insomnia have trouble falling or staying asleep. Anxiety about falling asleep often makes the condition worse. Most of us have occasional insomnia.
But chronic insomnia—lasting at least 3 nights per week for more than a month—can trigger serious daytime problems such as exhaustion, irritability and difficulty concentrating. Common therapies include relaxation and deep-breathing techniques. Sometimes medicine is prescribed. But consult a doctor before trying even over-the-counter sleep pills, as they may leave you feeling unrefreshed in the morning.
People with sleep apnea have a loud, uneven snore although not everyone who snores has apnea. Breathing repeatedly stops or becomes shallow. Apnea is dangerous. Phyllis Zee, a sleep apnea expert at Northwestern University. Blood pressure spikes, your heart rate fluctuates and the brain wakes you up partially to start your breathing again. This creates stress. Apnea can leave you feeling tired and moody. You may have trouble thinking clearly. If you have mild sleep apnea, you might try sleeping on your side, exercising or losing weight to reduce symptoms.
This helps makes you feel perky when you wake up and switches on your appetite. Ever wondered why you have to go to the toilet to pee every couple of hours during the day, but can sleep a whole eight without heading to the loo? Thank ADH, an anti-diuretic hormone released by the brain under a circadian rhythm which switches off the need to urinate so often overnight. Without enough sleep, your immune system might not be able to function at its best.
Insomnia: what is it and when should you get help? Sleep Health Foundation Australia. Skip links and keyboard navigation Skip to content Skip to site navigation Skip to footer Use tab and cursor keys to move around the page more information. Throughout your time asleep, your brain will cycle repeatedly through two different types of sleep: REM rapid-eye movement sleep and non-REM sleep.
The first part of the cycle is non-REM sleep , which is composed of four stages. The first stage comes between being awake and falling asleep. The second is light sleep, when heart rate and breathing regulate and body temperature drops. The third and fourth stages are deep sleep. Though REM sleep was previously believed to be the most important sleep phase for learning and memory, newer data suggests that non-REM sleep is more important for these tasks, as well as being the more restful and restorative phase of sleep.
As you cycle into REM sleep , the eyes move rapidly behind closed lids, and brain waves are similar to those during wakefulness. Breath rate increases and the body becomes temporarily paralyzed as we dream. The cycle then repeats itself, but with each cycle you spend less time in the deeper stages three and four of sleep and more time in REM sleep.
Johns Hopkins sleep expert and neurologist Mark Wu, M.
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