SLEEP DISTURBANCES

Humans may suffer from various sleep disorders, including:

• Dyssomnias: Insomnia(lack of sleeping), hypersomnia(Excessive sleeping), narcolepsy(irresistible urge to sleep), and sleep apnoea(shallow breathing during sleep).
• Parasomnias: Sleepwalking and REM behaviour disturbances.
• Bruxism: Grinding the teeth and clenching the jaw.

Sleep disturbances: Why ?

A sleep disturbance is in essence a sleep disorder, which is a condition that frequently impacts your ability to get enough quality sleep. While it’s normal to occasionally experience difficulties in sleeping, but when this becomes a recurrent problem and when it goes beyond your tolerance or affects your daily living, then it becomes a problem.

There are tens of reasons why people experience difficulty in sleeping or get enough sleeping. It’ll be too much for any reader to go through any list of causes. Hence, I would just give an outline of the main causes not to overload my nice readers with an academic stuff that they may find difficult to understand or too puzzling to grasp !!.

I will take this subject of sleep disturbances into two categories:

1. Excessive sleeping(hypersomnia).
2. Lack of sleeping(insomnia).

Excessive sleeping:

Five main categories for some people to feel sleepy all time, or to have a strong desire to sleep and at least to resist falling into that.

1. Organic(pathological) causes: Medical conditions such as stroke, dementia, epilepsy, myasthenia gravis, etc. can also result from medical conditions associated with metabolic disorders such as: under active thyroid, pituitary, or adrenal glands. Excessive sleeping can also results from low blood sugar especially in diabetes mellitus , low nutritional elements in the blood such as iron, calcium, sodium, potassium, magnesium, zinc, etc. Also fatigue like in multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and chronic fatigue syndrome, etc.
2. Drugs and medications.
3. Environmental causes: Lack of or insufficient sleeping at night, heat and humidity, lack of proper ventilation in the house or office, etc. 
4. Psychological(non-organic, functional): Depression, personality disorders, lack of motivation, lack of social interaction, loneliness, etc.
5. Familial, cultural, socioeconomic, etc.

Insufficient sleeping

I would probably divide the causes of lack of sleeping into five major groups:

1. Organic(pathological) conditions: Overactive thyroid, hyperadrenalism, urinary bladder problems, prostate problems, bowel problems including irritable bowel syndrome, colitis, etc.
2. Drugs and medications.
3. Felt(somatic) reasons: pain, stiffness, cramps, deformities, congestion, breathing problems,and restless leg syndrome. Also, external factors such as noise, heat, and humidity.
4. Hidden(functional, non-organic) reasons: Anxiety, stress, worry, fear, apprehension, and depression.
5. Under estimated: Familial, cultural, circadian rhythm disturbances, REM disorders, etc.

It is so important that, any one with sleep problems has to sit down and think instead of panicking in trying to pin point the likely cause or causes for their sleep problems and sort out those causes through the right means. It is also important for every one with sleep problems to take the problem seriously, but never to see it as a mountain. Everything in relation to sleep disturbances is resolvable, but we just need to think and take the right action which could be seeking a professional advice.

Sleep disturbances: What to do?

This section is going to be the most important part of this subject, and obviously the most challenging. I will try my best to help and make life easier for those who are seriously suffering from this problem.

Those who suffer from excessive sleeping are in my view less challenging than those who suffer from insomnia, even though I do appreciate very much their suffering. Most of the excessive sleeping sufferers do suffer from other medical problems, and those will no doubt need their medical problems identified and then be sorted out by specialised and skillful professionals.

Anyone who suffers from excessive sleeping must see a doctor. A clever doctor will for sure take this matter seriously, and will work hard to find out if the problem is organic or non-organic in nature. This task can be challenging on itself, but it is the key towards help and sorting out.

Most of the organic problems are in today’s medicine treatable. Hence, the problem will remain in the first phase which is knowing what was wrong.

For those who sleep a lot or feel sleepy most of the time, the first step is to enquire about their night sleep. We are here talking about sleep patterns, and we are in essence talking about “quality”, but not quantity. How many hours you spend in bed doesn’t help me that much, but how do you spend those hours in bed is very important for me to know if we are serious in our attempts to help sufferers.

We – doctors – need always , always to see our patients as human beings, but not patients… not ill people. We need to see diseases and illnesses through the human spectrum. We need to see every patient as us, and the only difference is that the patient is suffering from an illness which needs to be identified, then treated to the best and the latest of our knowledge and understanding. We need – doctors – to be not just up to date with medical advances, but in my view . . . to be ahead of them. 

Good quality sleeping . . . an interesting phrase, but we – doctors & patients – need to agree on a good definition to it. Yes, what we mean by a good quality sleep?.

Babies may have some sort of fears, but their fears are so mild, and they do cease at the moment when they are held in their mum’s laps or placed gently in their cradles with mum’s touch !. Babies do not bother that much about life affairs, and as long they are clean and had their milk, they just sleep so nicely and feel very much contented. They don’t carry life troubles with them to bed, because they don’t know much about them !!. Can we copy them?!. If we do, then we can taste a baby’s sleep and enjoy it.

Let us look at that person who goes to bed to sleep, then stays in bed waiting for the first snooze to visit, and yet, not yet. Everything is possible, but no chance of snoozing let alone falling asleep. Did you think why?. Have you attempted to know why?. Is it possible to know why?. What would you do to attract sleeping to your eyes?. 

When you like to attract some one, you just look deeply at their eyes, and offer that “look”, then you can guarantee to own the attention of that person, and may be forever !. Would you do that with sleeping?. No, never. Here, you need to do the contrary. Shut your eyes, and never gaze, and never dream too much . . .  just calm down and relax !.

When we are dealing with the other side of the coin . . . no much sleep at night when you really long for it.

It can be difficult for me to imagine the real effect of the lack of sleep for many nights, could be “the nights of all the person’s adult life” . I wanted to empathise with the sufferers, but honestly speaking I can’t. I don’t remember one time in my life that I have struggled to sleep. I always find my way to the avenue for good night sleep. Insomnia is not in my dictionary, and struggling to get to sleep is not my experience . . .  but why?.

I am just an ordinary person like any one of you. I don’t have any thing special what so ever. All what I have got is “reality” . . . yes, I am very much realistic, I am logic, I do calculate a lot, and most importantly may be . . . I don’t worry much about life, and I never cling into things. I just live with my means, and I feel very much contented. One of my mottos in life is: what you can live with, you can live without apart from oxygen and water. Oxygen and water are available everywhere, and they are free of charge . . .  oxygen comes from the free air, and water comes from the free rain !!. 

I am that kind of a person. I don’t bother much about things, and I am very flexible. I never worry about the future, I never fear the unknown, I don’t fear ghosts, devils, Jinns, beasts, or the magicians. I am very much logic, and for me everything is based on the rule of 1+1=2. That is my life in summary, and just one thing to add . . . I never ever fear death. I am so happy in my life, and I do enjoy and entertain every day I live. I do believe that I am going to live up to 150 years, but I never fear death, and I don’t worry about the unknown. I care a lot about things those I can change, and I can manipulate. The future I think about and prepare for, but if anything doesn’t happen as planned, I just say to myself: the future is not in my hand, and I can never be certain about what will happen in the next second, let alone tomorrow or the next year. The future is God’s affair, and I can only do my best. When it comes to the past . . . for me the past has gone, and what has gone we can never bring it back . . . why then should I waste my time thinking about it or worry about the past?.

So, in summary, the future is not mine to sort out, the past is history . ..  then, what is left for me to think about and sort out is “the present”. I deal with the present in a philosophical way. There are three things for me to deal with:

1. Things those I can sort out now . ..  I just sort them out with no delay.
2. Things those could be sorted out later . . . I just leave them on the table or sofa before I go to bed, and I will never take them with me to bed. Bed for me is for sleeping, but not for sorting out unsorted problems. Tomorrow is another day, and tomorrow I will sort out what could be sorted out.
3. Things those I can never sort out, and I know I will never achieve, like becoming a millionaire, or winning the lottery !!. Those things I just drop them in the bin and forget thinking about them.

Hence, you can very easily see that when I go to bed, I will never take unresolved problems with me. For me bed is for sleeping, haven for tranquillising; but not for solving problems !!.

That is me in reality, and that is why I never suffer from sleeping disorders, and never suffer from headache. You can learn from me if you like, and you can do it very easily.