Are you sleeping well?

 

Sleep around 8 hours per day, and improving the quality of sleeping.

Who never had a terrible night of sleep that someone was snoring too loud? Probably that person doesn’t have a good one too.

A good night's sleep is characterized not only by how many hours you slept but also by the quality of it through a rhythmic, cyclic process that alternates between three stages of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep and a fourth stage of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (Brown, 2012). This is known as sleep architecture, and when it is disrupted, individuals do not realize the full restorative benefits of sleep.

Numerous factors, including genetics (Dashti, 2019), physical activity (Murawski, 2018), food (Saidi, 2020), and environmental conditions (Morsing, 2018), affect the quality of sleep. Sleep affects the body in a number of ways, including lowering energy expenditure and speeding up the brain's recovery of stored energy, controlling the innate and adaptive immune systems, and aiding in memory consolidation, which is the process by which learned information is stored in the brain (Irwin, 2016). Sleep disturbances are linked to the development and course of numerous illnesses, such as cancer, depression, and cardiovascular disease (Yu, 2016).

Healthy individuals' sleep duration reduces with age: a newborn requires 14–17 hours of sleep per day, adults need 7–9 hours, and elderly persons need 7–8 hours (Hirshkowitz, 2015). Sleeping less than seven hours is linked to worse health and a lower level of wellbeing. Furthermore, those who sleep less hours than the recommended seven to eight hours a day are more likely to suffer from mental health issues, depression, coronary heart disease, metabolic syndrome, and high blood pressure (Watson, 2015).

Sleep problems can be screened using a variety of techniques, including several validated questionnaires. The Epworth drowsiness Scale (ESS) measures daytime drowsiness (Johns, 1992), the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index measures sleep quality (Nishiyama, 2014), and the STOP-BANG measures undiagnosed obstructive sleep apnea (Chung, 2016).

I chose hygiene of sleeping as a habit because, as a physiotherapist, I studied it, and I had a lot of patients that used to have chronic pain linked to sleep disorders. They used to take different medications that had been prescribed by different doctors, each one with their own theory about pain and disorders, but the symptoms never end. The only common symptom those patients had was the poor quality of sleeping. All of those doctors used to analyze only the local symptoms, focused on the specific local pain, and the medicines that those patients had been taking. None of them asked about daily routine, diet, exercise, hydration, or even about the sleep quality. As I enhance my skills and acquire more experience, I explore different types of assessment for those specific patients, based on scientific databases. I also realized that it is more frequent than I thought and probably sub-notified. It does not matter how much effort I put into my treatments if the patients did not sleep well constantly.

Knowing about the issues of poor-quality sleep, or not sleeping enough, I decided to invest in my health for the future, changing my habits in the present. It is necessary to find the balance between work, study, exercise, diet, hobbies, and sleep. A lack of one, or spending too much time in one of those domains, can be extremely prejudicial. So, for monitoring the progress, it can be through periodical questionnaires that measure the sleep quality, such details as how many times you usually go to the washroom, if you woke up for drinking water, how many times you wake during the night, if you wake with your own snoring, or other issues. Another simple form to measure is questioning yourself if you wake up better than when you went to sleep, if you wake up but you are still tired. Additionally, I will measure my daily hours of sleep, such as review my schedule, and check if I am managing my time properly. The effective progress can take some time; that is why it is important to monitor other symptoms that can indicate we are progressing, even if we thought that we were not. Improve your health starting with a good sleep.

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