Link Between Chronic Pain And Insomnia Revealed!

If you are suffering from chronic pain, you can have additional problems like insomnia, where you have disrupted or lack of sleep.

Chronic pain can be back pain, muscle pain, fatigue, and muscle stiffness.

Back pain is the common type of chronic pain. The pain can interfere with your good night sleep.

If you have disturbed sleep, it can aggravate chronic back pain problem. Therefore, a continuous cycle develops where your back pain can cause insomnia and insomnia in turn can make the back pain worse.

Insomnia includes all types of sleep problems such as difficulty in staying asleep, difficulty in falling asleep and awakening earlier and not going to sleep again.

According to the researchers, 65 percent of the people reported that they are awakened during nighttime due to pain and 62 percent people have waked up early due to chronic pain. If you have chronic back pain, you will not feel refreshed in the morning when you are awake.

If you have chronic pain, you will have lack of deep sleep, more awakenings during night and less efficient sleep. Therefore, your quality of sleep will be lessened and unrefreshing. Lack of sleep can cause fatigue, depressed mood and worsened pain during daytime.

If you do not know the cause of chronic pain, it can make you anxious. The pain becomes less severe when your condition is being diagnosed. Worry about the condition also makes the condition severe.

Chronic pain can impact your sleep in number of ways:

For getting good night sleep, you will try to eliminate all distractions and try to relax and begin to fall asleep. The distraction eliminations can be making the room quiet, eliminating the noises, turning the lights off and trying to get comfortable to sleep.

When you eliminate the distractions, it can cause problem for you because the only thing left for you to think is your pain.

You will be distracting your mind from the chronic pain during daytime by watching television, reading magazines, books, and interacting with other people such as your family members and friends. At night, there will be no distractions to divert your pain and you will concentrate only on pain.

Treatment for chronic pain and insomnia:

You should not take treatment only for insomnia, but you should also consider chronic pain problem, which is a cause of the insomnia. Behavioral therapy is effective in treating insomnia and chronic pain problems. There will ne no side effects with behavioral therapy.

When you have consulted doctor and started to take medications for insomnia, you should talk to the doctor about the chronic pain medications you are already taking.

Behavioral therapy includes identifying the source of chronic pain, practicing sleep hygiene that improves your quality of sleep, following the techniques such as relaxation, hypnosis, and deep breathing.