Knowing what to do about insomnia
Insomnia is a sleep disorder that regularly affects millions of people worldwide. In short, individuals with insomnia find it difficult to fall asleep or stay asleep. The effects can be devastating. It affects both men and women. Insomnia leads to a higher risk of developing chronic diseases, such as hypertension, renal and reproductive functions.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, between 30 and 40 per cent of American adults report that they have had symptoms of insomnia within the last 12 months and more than 10 per cent of adults claim to have chronic insomnia.
Olanisun Adewole, in a report, concluded that about seven out of every ten patients presenting to the Family Medicine Clinic of the Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospital had sleep disorders. Other studies reported a similarly high incidence of insomnia, particularly among women.
If you are one of these women aged 40 and more, who find it difficult to sleep, you are not alone. Many women wake up every night between 3 am and 4 am and start lurking around the house.
It is now clear that the inability to sleep affects not only women, but also men. In Medicine, there is a faculty that deals with sleep medicine due to the increase in the number of people being affected. In frustration you may begin to pace about the house, cleaning the kitchen floor, surfing the Internet or watching Cable News Network or movies on late night TV.
Several small studies in adults and children have suggested that exposure to light from televisions and smart phones before going to sleep can affect natural melatonin levels and lead to increased time to sleep. Besides, a study conducted by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute found that backlit tablet computers can change sleep patterns. These studies suggest that technology in the bedroom can worsen insomnia, leading to more complications.
Getting a good night’s sleep becomes more difficult as we age, but women in menopause find it particularly challenging to get a good night’s sleep. In many cases, this inability to sleep is due to too much oestrogen in your system that is not balanced by progesterone.
Before menopause, oestrogen is the dominant hormone for about the first two weeks in the menstrual cycle and progesterone is dominant in the last two weeks of the period. When menopause occurs these two hormones naturally should continue to balance each other, but if you are a woman at menopause leading a stressful lifestyle, you may find that your production of progesterone is suppressed or converted to stress hormones and you will have a dominance of oestrogen in your system leading to sleeplessness and other unpleasant menopausal symptoms.
Using a little progesterone cream made from natural bio-identical plant sources may help you quickly solve this problem. The right way to use progesterone cream or oil is to use about one-eighth or a quarter of a teaspoon daily for three weeks, with a week of each month to maintain the sensitivity of the progesterone receptors. Natural progesterone cream made from bio-identical plant sources is not the same as the synthetic hormone progestin produced from animal sources.
I know some women who have not slept for longer than four hours since they started menopause. When they were given some progesterone cream, they reported that they were able to sleep for eight hours. It was a significant turning point in their recovery from a long list of menopausal and health problems.
For men, the most prevalent cause of insomnia is either lack of funds or having too much and planning how to get the money or how to expand and protect the funds
If it’s not hormones, what is it? Look for the simplest solutions first
If after taking progesterone cream you still cannot sleep, then you need to look for other causes. Another general object of sleeplessness is due to food intolerance or allergies. Most people will have a high spike in blood sugar levels after eating or drinking something sweet. It is fine during the day, but eating sugary foods at bedtime will lead to a hypoglycemic episode 90 minutes later that will result in a surge of adrenaline that will keep you awake for several hours. Eating cheese close to the time of going to bed may also prevent some people awake. Many kinds of cheese have high amounts of tyrosine, which is used to make a stimulant produced by your adrenal gland known as noradrenaline.
If you have chronic insomnia, it is a good idea to keep a food diary of the food you eat so that you can correlate foods consumed and the quality of your sleep each night. This way you can begin to have a better sense of foods that help you to sleep and those that pump up your system to keep you tossing and turning all night.
The liver does its job of digesting your food between 1 am, and 3 am. If you eat anything that it finds difficult to understand, then you will likely be waking up around this time. Eating late may also cause insomnia for this reason. Try to eat no later than 6 pm so that your food would have had time to digest before you sleep.