Archive for the 'Sleep Related Disorders' Category

Sleep apnea and acid reflux disease are linked together. If you are suffering from acid reflux disease, you often find it difficult to sleep.

You can have sessions of nausea, heart burn or exhibit sleep apnea.

Many acid reflux sufferers get symptoms during night after they go to sleep.

Number of studies also showed that sleep apnea sufferers also have nighttime acid reflux and vice versa.

If you suffer from sleep apnea and acid reflux, you often feel drowsy during day time because you don’t get sleep at night.

Acid reflux is a condition characterized by heartburn that can wake you in the middle of the night.

Sleep apnea causes when the soft tissue at the back of the throat collapses and blocks your airway, causing you to stop breathing while you sleep. When it happens, you wake up to start breathing again.

Suffering from both makes you tired than either one alone. According to few experts, Apneas cause reflux symptoms probably.

The pressure within the lungs and gastrointestinal systems are changed by apneas causing stomach contents to be drawn up into the esophagus causing inflammation resulting in acid reflux. Esophagus is a tube that connects the stomach with the throat.

Your endocrine, immune and nervous system difficulties work together to affect one of the less measurable causes of bipolar disorders.

Bipolar disorder is disturbances in body rhythms. Your nervous system with bipolar disorder frequently makes specific types of regulatory errors.

Many of them involve body’s internal clock, which controls the phenomena called as circadian rhythm.

Circadian rhythms are the regular rhythmic changes in waking and sleeping. The chemical clock that governs these rhythms is located in a part of the hypothalamus gland called the suprachiamatic nucleus.

It regulates the pineal gland’s secretion of the hormone melatonin. Hypothalamus is the link between nervous and endocrine systems.

Nervous system is associated with immune system and hypothalamus exerts it effect on the immune system. The combination of these systems can alter your body chemistry, contributing to shifts in body rhythms such as circadian, social and seasonal rhythms.

Circadian rhythm is a 24 hour cycle of the body. When circadian rhythm is upset, mood disturbances can result. In some people sleep deprivation causes mania and in some it can alleviate depression.

For maintaining mental health, regulation of circadian rhythm is important. If the system is not regulated, it can lead to stress.

In many sleep and eating disorders, the inability to manage stress leads to sleep problems and obesity as food is normally consumed in large quantities during high stress periods, especially for emotional eaters.

Night eating syndrome is a disorder where the affected individual wakes up during the night and unable to fall asleep unless they eat something.

Foods eaten during the night are often high caloric in content and unhealthy. The night eating syndrome is beyond the person’s control.

If you have night eating syndrome, you take 35% or more of the calories after dinner time which leads to obesity. You will not feel hungry in the morning due to night eating. You are caught in the vicious cycle of binge eating during the night and less eating during the day.

Triggers for Night Eating Syndrome:

• Depression [Manage Depression]
• Anxiety
• Boredom
• Prolonged dieting
• Stress
• Sleep walking [Sleep Walking Treatment]

Night eating relieves temporarily the stress of these unwanted feelings but you feel guilt, shame, disgust and further depression due to this behavior. If you are suffering from night eating syndrome, you eat usually in secret and hide it from others.

If you consume alcohol at bedtime, it decreases the time required to fall asleep after initial stimulating effect.

Due to the sedative effect of alcohol, many people with sleep problems consume alcohol to promote sleep.

But, alcohol consumed within one hour of bedtime disrupts the second half of the sleep period.

You will be awakened from dreams and return to sleep with difficulty which leads to sleep problems.

If you continue the alcohol consumption before bedtime, the sleep inducing effect of alcohol may decrease and its disruptive effects continue to increase. This sleep disruption can lead to daytime sleepiness and fatigue.

Elderly people are at higher risks because higher levels of alcohol are achieved in blood and brain than young people after consuming equivalent dose.

If older people consume alcohol before bedtime, it can lead to unsteadiness if walking is attempted during the night with increased risks of falls and injuries.

According to the studies, alcohol consumed six hours before bedtime can increase wakefulness during the second half of sleep. With alcohol consumption, there are increased effects of sleep deprivation.

Many people do not believe that snoring is a sleep disorder.

But, it is a sleep disorder which has many health complications.

As you already know, it affects your relationships with whomsoever you share the bed.

You become frustrating and irritating when you see that all the snoring cures never work for you.

You have gone to bed at the same time every night, you have changed your lifestyle and you have used different nasal strips but you still snore away.

Despite using all these things, still you are snoring, then it could be sign that you need something more permanent. A snoring implant helps you and is very safe for you.

You can use snoring implant if:

• You are sleeping on your side and not on your back but still snoring continues.
• You have tried different type of pillow to elevate your head and still you snore through the night.
• Being obese is the cause for snoring, but you are at ideal weight and suffering with snoring problems.
• Home cures are not working for you and you don’t have health problems like allergies or lifestyle habits like smoking.

Fibromyalgia causes extreme pain in the muscles throughout the body.

As many as three to six million people, mostly women are suffering from fibromyalgia pain.

The symptoms include muscle pain spread across the body, extreme fatigue or tiredness.

Sometimes pain associated with the illness can be so intense that sufferers cannot continue with their daily tasks.

If you suffer from chronic pain syndrome, your sleep is disturbed, suffer from headaches, become extremely stiff in the morning, experience numbness or suffer from memory problems.

Fibromyalgia and sleep disorders go hand in hand. Up to 80% of people with fibromyalgia experience some type of sleep disorders. These sleep disorders leave the person tired, exhausted and physically incapable of dealing with stresses associated with fibromyalgia.

Fibromyalgia pain can also lead to restless leg syndrome. Fibromyalgia sufferers tend to lack normal amounts of slow wave sleep that is deepest and soundest stages of sleep. These stages are important for the restoration of body during sleep.

Therefore if one is deprived of normal slow wave sleep, they develop fibromyalgia symptoms.

Treatment for Fibromyalgia Syndrome:

For the treatment of fibromyalgia, doctors should first find out what causes chronic pain syndrome. Doctors are not sure if environmental factors or hereditary factors cause fibromyalgia syndrome.