What better way to observe Festival of Sleep Day than to take a deeper dive into the popular topic of Insomnia.
As a pain management practitioner for those in chronic pain, based near the NEC Birmingham, I spend a lot of time with people who spend all day desperately trying to stay awake with sheer exhaustion. When bedtime comes, and their head hits that pillow, BOOM! They’re wide awake, tossing, turning, and remembering all the things they have or haven’t said and done throughout the day.
The way insomnia, or even just a disturbed sleep pattern, is making people feel I felt it important to take a better look at Insomnia to look at ways of improving sleep patterns to better manage the affects that Insomnia has on our health.
So, what is this, how does it impact on our overall health, what are the implications of just carrying on with things as they are, can it come and go?
What is Insomnia?
Insomnia is a sleep disorder where you struggle to get to sleep, stay asleep, or even both. Effecting more than one third of the population at some time or another. According to the Cleveland Clinic 10-15% of those have Chronic Insomnia.
Insomnia is more common amongst women due to the hormone fluctuations we go through on daily, weekly, monthly basis, and then the menopause hits! More simple causes of insomnia range anywhere from the environment you are trying to sleep in, jet lag, shift patterns, stress, anxiety, depression, recreational drugs, mental health conditions, as well as other physical and neurological disorders.
What Does Insomnia Look Like?
Do you lay in your bed at night with the events of the day and the following day whizzing around your head while you are desperately trying to slip off into the land of nod?
When you finally do drop off to sleep, do you find yourself tossing, turning, getting up to go to the toilet, and then wake up three and four hours before your alarm is due to go off and no matter how hard you try you just cannot rest and return to sleep, so you get up, sleepily, to start your day.
As you work through your day that feeling of being unrefreshed that you woke up with just grows and takes over your day, eats away at your motivation, your dreams, and your physical energy. As your physical energy reduces, you do less to avoid feeling ‘too tired’, as you do less your muscles get less and less use and their strength reduces and then when you do try to make use of those muscles to get up out of the chair, to walk to the shop, it feels like you are wading through waist height sludge and totally exhausts you.
Now you are completely exhausted, and it is impacting on your relationships and your social life. You are too tired to ‘people’ and anyone in the house should watch out and run for cover as your patience wears thinner and thinner with everyone and everything.
Are any of these symptoms bugging you right now? Stick with me, keep reading on, to learn how insomnia affects our overall health, the implications of insomnia, and what you can do to help relieve the symptoms of insomnia.
How Does Insomnia Affect Our Overall Health?
Our bodies need certain elements to keep it running at its optimal, the basic needs as human beings are food, water, oxygen, and sleep. Without sleep our bodies are unable to recover from the activities of each day, our internal organs such as our heart and the blood vessels, our muscles are unable to rest and recover, our brains are unable to process and file the information and memories of the day.
All the inability to repair through sleeping can lead to further health and more serious health problems on a physical, mental, and emotional level. You could go on to develop conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, depression, anxiety, weight gain, and even go onto have a stroke.
Clearly these are the affects on our own personal bodies and minds but what about the wider implications of insomnia, those that have an affect on our livelihood, our present and our future, as well as others around us.
The Wider Implications of Insomnia?
When your brain is unable to rest and recover from the previous day, it can have a profound effect on how we process information, how we concentrate, how we control our emotions, and how we make rational and good decisions, some implications you’ll find in my original Festival of Sleep Day blog from back in 2020, before the world went mad.
So, when your telephone rings and the bank say they need your details to process a transaction, or whatever the latest scam is out currently, will you be alert and concentrating enough to know that this is not your bank, or will you be exhausted and dazed taking part in the phone call, answering their questions, and following their instructions?
With all the impact that insomnia can have on my physical body, mental capabilities and emotions is there something you can do to help improve insomnia and the effects which it is having daily? Can insomnia really go away, if it can, will it come back again, and how can I help it go away?
Can Insomnia Come and Go?
Insomnia can be a right royal pain in the ass and a bit like the boomerang, going away and coming back again, just like the boomerang when the wind knocks its course, it doesn’t come back.. Very present and hitting hard when you need to be at your best both physically and mentally and that’s where maintaining a healthy, regular sleep routine and practicing good sleep hygiene can really come into its own. Enabling you to ‘get a grip’ on Insomnia and get a full restful night’s sleep, waking up feeling nice and refreshed for the day ahead. Should you still not feel refreshed when you are no longer struggling with Insomnia, you will want to speak with your GP as there could be many underlying reasons for this such as sleep apnoea among other things.
As a chronic pain warrior with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia I find that Insomnia creeps up on me frequently when I am not following my daily routines. My sleep routine begins from the moment I wake up. Starting my day with eight-20minutes on my BEMER with a drink of water and my daily devotional book. It is only after I have been on the BEMER that I will contemplate any activity because BEMER works on my body and its internal working on a micro level, it is the foundation of not only my sleep routine but also my pain management plan because it helps keep my pain at manageable levels too by ensuring oxygen and nutrients are being delivered where they are needed.
I have a whole array of tools and products which I use alongside of BEMER Therapy to manage Insomnia when it hits and over time and with perseverance the symptoms of insomnia will go away….until the next time!
If you are currently suffering the affects of insomnia and would like to ‘get a grip’ on them then why not book yourself a BEMER appointment and feel the benefits for yourself? Appointments are available every Thursday and Friday between 10am and 6pm near the NEC Birmingham.
Be the wind to your insomnia boomerang!
