It’s 3:34 am and you are wide awake, your thoughts racing from subject to subject like squirrels chasing each other. It’s too late to take a sleep aid, and getting up at this hour is just not appealing. So you pound the pillow one more time and prepare to tough out another sleepless night; hoping that you don’t look too haggard when you give that presentation in the morning. Insomnia strikes again.
You’re not alone. According to the CDC, 50-70 million Americans suffer from some form of sleep disorder or impairment. Not being able to sleep causes people to have a lower quality of life; and can also lead to impaired cognitive function, memory loss, and higher risk of accident. Although it’s unclear exactly to what extent insomnia affects health, scientists do know that sleep plays an essential role in brain development and cellular repair. When you can’t sleep, you are operating at a deficit.
Tired of being tired?
You could take a pill. Americans filled 60 million prescriptions for sleeping pills in 2012, up from 47 million in 2006. Prescription and over-the-counter medications for insomnia can be effective for some individuals; but they are a controversial treatment option and generally not recommended for long-term use. Recent studies have not only established a correlation between taking sleeping pills and premature death but also revealed that they don’t work significantly better than a placebo.
Perhaps the biggest problem with using a medication to treat insomnia is you are treating the manifestation of a symptom without getting at the underlying cause. Insomnia is not a disease. Instead, it is a response to a combination of internal and external factors, many of which have their origin in our hectic postindustrial world.
Taking a holistic approach to insomnia prevention means tackling the underlying causes and using both integrative medicine and commonsense lifestyle changes to create an environment and state of mind that are more conducive to sleep. Here’s how.
Reduce Stress
Stress is the number one reason Americans can’t sleep. When you feel under the gun for a long period of time, your body is constantly flooded with stress hormones that trigger activity in the hypothalamus and disturb its natural process. At its worse, the result can be perpetual loop of anxiety and insomnia that feed into each other, keeping you awake even when you feel exhausted.
The only way to break this cycle is to calm your body down with a proven stress-reduction technique.
- Take a yoga class and learn controlled breathing techniques.
- Play soothing music in the car during your daily commute.
- Practice mindfulness meditation.
- Make sure you get regular cardiovascular exercise.
The modern world moves at a frenetic pace, and it’s difficult not to react at that same high-pitch. But if you can learn to control your reactions and calm down, you will be able to facilitate the physiological, hormonal, and neurological conditions that ensure good sleep.
Control Your Sleep Environment
Another reason people aren’t sleeping well is that their bedrooms aren’t designed for proper rest. Most Americans have a television in their bedroom and keep their smartphone on the bedside table. Add to that a partner who snores, the barking dog next door, and that beacon of light from your neighbor’s deck, and it’s a wonder you can get any sleep at all!
You can’t control every variable, but even a few fixes will help to make things more conducive to a good night’s rest:
- Make sure to turn off your electronic devices an hour before you plan to sleep. Sleep studies show that artificial light fools the brain into thinking it is light outside and upsets your natural circadian rhythm, leading to sleep disturbance.
- Set your central heat to “fan” or purchase a noise machine. This ambient noise can help mask irregular background sounds that contribute to poor sleep.
- Turn down the heat. People sleep best when the temperature is between 65-68 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Don’t eat a heavy meal right before bedtime. When you lie down with a full stomach, the pyloric valve weakens, causing acid reflux and gastric disturbance and making it hard for you to get a good night’s rest. Recent studies show that eating late at night is a great way to pack on some extra pounds as well.
- Get in a routine. Our bodies are genetically programmed to respond to an internal clock, which is why your children wake up a 6:30 am on the weekend, ready to take on the day. If you want to improve the quality of your sleep, you have to get in the habit of going to bed and rising at approximately the same time — weekday and weekend.
Consider Integrative Medicine
Although it is evolving, Western medicine has a tendency to treat each condition in isolation; not really thinking about the human body as an interconnected system, let alone how people interact with their environment. Holistic treatments for insomnia are just the opposite. An integrative practitioner may combine Western practices with traditional Chinese medicine treatments such as acupuncture, diet, and herbal remedies; seeking to achieve good sleeping habits by creating balance within the body and harmony between a person and their environment.
In traditional Chinese medicine, chronic insomnia is an imbalance in the spleen, heart, or liver. It takes special care to determine which organ system is causing the disturbance; as such, acupuncture or acupressure treatments are prescribed, sometimes in combination with herbal formulas, to restore proper flow of energy.
Integrative medicine encourages patients to be partners in the healing process, and treatment is a process of constant reassessment. This is an ideal way to treat insomnia, which results from disturbances to your mood and disruptions in your environment. Combining stress reduction and lifestyle modifications is proven to stop counting sheep and get back to sleeping like a baby.