Sleep Problems Video
In this video on sleep problems, Mark discusses the different types of sleep disorders and some ideas you can use to improve your chances of having a good night’s sleep. Mark talks about how stress interacts with our sleep patterns, how worry interferes with sleep and what you can do about that. Mark discusses the function of the different types of sleep - slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and how these different sleep stages are affected by interrupted sleep.
Transcript of Sleep Problems video
We all spend around a third of our entire lives asleep, and Nature wouldn’t prioritize sleep so much unless it was vital for our health and wellbeing. But oftentimes, of course, sleep goes wrong. We can all get by on a compromised night’s sleep now and then; we can survive that - our body will produce cortisol, a stress hormone, to give us the energy to keep going. But if we have ongoing sleep problems, then that can begin to severely impact our mental and physical wellbeing.
The different types of sleep problems are:
- What we call ‘delayed sleep onset’, where you just can’t seem to get to sleep; you’re lying in bed, and you don’t get to sleep.
- Sometimes people get off to sleep okay, but they find they wake up during the night, or wake up in the very early hours of the morning and can’t go back to sleep again.
- Or sometimes people sleep, but the quality of their sleep isn’t so great.
Sleep isn’t just sleep. We have ‘slow-wave sleep’, which we need to rebuild and grow the muscles that have been used during the day and to refresh the immune system and so forth. And we have ‘dream sleep’, which has other functions, to do with managing our emotional life. If the balance of the different types of sleep gets out of kilter, then we can wake up exhausted. If we’ve been dreaming too much during the night, we can wake up exhausted and unmotivated, because we haven’t had enough slow-wave, recuperative sleep and we’ve over-exhausted ourselves from dreaming too much - what we call ‘restless sleep’. So it’s the amount of sleep we get which is important, but also the quality of the sleep that we have.
Now there are, of course, well-known techniques and safeguards to sleeping well, such as insuring that we have a cool enough and dark enough environment, making sure that we don’t watch TV too late in the evening before going to bed, and of course avoiding caffeine or nicotine and other stimulants in the hours before bedtime. It’s also curious that one of the most reliable ways to get to sleep is actually to wear socks in bed; it might help you sleep better - it might not improve your sex life, but you can’t have everything! But the reason that sock wearing is effective for going to sleep is because in order to drift into sleep, we need to have a comparative drop in core body temperature; so the feet warming through wearing socks or visualizing the hands growing warmer are reliable ways of drifting off to sleep because they’re artificially getting that shift in temperature focus in the body.
Another big factor in sleeping is, of course, stress. Stress is designed to keep us awake and keep us alert. Initially in our evolution, stress was there to make us cognizant of wild animals around us. There’s no good falling asleep if you’re being pursued by a tiger! You need to stay awake and alert. Now, the tiger may be metaphorical; the ‘prowling predator’ might be your boss at work or mortgage arrears or relationship troubles and so forth, and that’s causing this cortisol inside of you, making you worry. Worrying is a stimulant as much as caffeine. So nine times out of ten when I’m treating somebody for a sleep disorder, we need to focus on how they’ve been worrying and switching off the worry, so that the stimulant of worry no longer troubles them in the same way and they can start getting back into the pattern of sleep.
It’s also true to say that sleep is very habitual. So even if the person isn’t worrying, if they’ve got into the pattern of waking up in the night or the pattern of going to bed and not sleeping for hours, then we might just need to deal with the pattern itself. For example, if someone’s been doing shift work in their working life for a long time and suddenly they retire, they might still be waking up at four in the morning to do the postal route, even though they’re no longer working for the post office. So we need to deal with, sometimes, the pure habit the person’s got into, even if they’re not worrying or they’re doing all the other things right. Or we may need to deal with lifestyle; the fact that they’re surfing the ‘Net until they go to bed will be stimulating them and stopping them sleep, perhaps, so we might need to deal with something like that. Or we need to deal with the worrying, the whirring round of the mind so that it starts to slow down and allows the person to drift into ‘Nature’s balm’, which is sleep.
Once you begin to sleep better, it really is transforming for your life. You start to regain sense of perspective, enjoyment, fun, humor, and drive, as well, to actually work towards what you want to achieve in life.
blog comments powered by Disqus
