by, Wenqi Qiu, LMSW
Five billion people go through the cycle of sleep and wakefulness every day, and relatively few of them know the joy of being fully rested and fully alert all day long.
—William Dement (1988)
Have you ever been lying in bed at night and asking yourself: why I’m tired, but I can’t sleep. The problem gets worse by day, and the pressure of falling asleep starts to mount. However, the harder you struggle to sleep, the more awake you are. A few weeks later, after another sleepless night, you begin to wonder with a fuzzy mind: Can insomnia kill you? Fortunately, you finally manage to fall asleep in one way or another. Still, anxiety keeps waking you up; the problem shifts from having trouble falling asleep to having trouble staying asleep. So, what exactly are the causes of insomnia or lack of sleep? Why can’t you sleep through the night?
Causes of Sleep Disorders
Environmental influences and emotional disturbance, besides general pathological reasons, are seen as the main causes of sleep disorders.
Problems in sleeping are prevalent and can be dated back to the time when humans evolved, unintentionally, many new sleep disorders alongside the development of modern society. Owing to the invention of lightbulbs, our circadian rhythm is disrupted by perpetual lighting, leading to sleep disturbance. The omnipresence and abuse of electronic devices in the bedroom also increases the likelihood of sleep deprivation.
People who are struggling with mental distress, both adults and youths, are more susceptible to insomnia. Multiple studies and investigations suggest the enormous extent to which significant sleep disorders are associated with depression and anxiety. Sleep abnormalities are common among people who suffer from emotional distress; conversely, emotional disorders herald and induce sleep problems. In other words, anxiety and sleep deprivation, or insomnia and depression, are closely related.
Psychological Effects of Insomnia
Sleep disturbances have psychological, behavioral, and health effects. But to generate demonstrable detrimental effects, insomnia needn’t be extensive. When we suffer from sleep loss on a daily basis, depletion in sleep duration will accumulate and cause daytime declines, which may affect our daytime performance and spirits.
Sleep problems undermine our capacity to stay alert; being vigilant paves the way for thinking, knowing, remembering, judging, and problem-solving. Thus, our inability to stay focused may cripple our capacity to, for example, come up with innovative solutions to issues. Worst of all, it increases the potential of a variety of mental and emotional disturbances. What might be the repercussions of internalizing the belief that ‘I can’t sleep well’ and connecting it with negative labels as an underachiever? The answer is obvious: it often produces a strong sense of hopelessness, which, sadly, might be the very beginning of emotional disorders.
How to Solve Sleeping Problems Naturally
Can insomnia be treated? The answer is yes. What are the strategies and treatments for insomnia in adults and youngsters?
Good sleep hygiene practices
Sleep hygiene is a term we use to describe the practices applied to enhance sleep quality, typically including sleep routine, sleep environment, and daytime activities. A bedtime routine is a set of predictable activities associated with good night sleep. One of the most common sleep hygiene practices is to make sure to go to bed and wake up consistently on the same schedule as part of the routine. Other normal sleep-induced conditions like darkness, beddings, and a quiet environment are generally regarded as good sleep stimuli. For example, using your bed only for sleep (except for sex) or going to bed only when you feel sleepy can help establish the desired connections between your bed and the activity of sleeping. Other good sleep hygiene practices include minimized electronic device usage and caffeine use. Various studies have demonstrated that using electronic devices can harm sleep, such as anxieties about sleep and shortened sleep length.
Relaxation and mindfulness sleep exercise
Relaxation and mindfulness meditation practice has been introduced into insomnia treatments as an alternative approach in recent years. When we focus our attention on both the internal experiences of thoughts and feelings and external experiences that take place here and now, with no judgment or criticism, we are, indeed, practicing relaxation and mindfulness for sleep. Relaxation is, in other words, mindfulness to the body and relief of physical pressure. Have you ever paid attention to your muscles and breath when you struggle to sleep? If you have, did you notice how inflexible your muscles became? Our body is born flexible, yet it gradually grows stiff because of the accumulation of negative emotional energies and stress. Learning how to adjust our breath to where it is most needed for rigid muscles to relax is a useful practice for insomnia.
Manage your stress
When you are stressed out, the simple act of falling or staying asleep can be not so simple. Luckily, we can always learn to lock the stress out of the bedroom door before we go to bed. For one, avoiding intense physical and mental activities before your routine sleep schedule, for example, thinking about the daytime worries before you go to sleep, can be detrimental to both your sleep quality and sleep duration. Instead of letting worries invade our sleep mind, we can practice making notes of our concerns, fears, and problems at least hours before going to bed, and ‘seal’ them on paper for the next morning to come up with solutions when you wake up. In so doing, we sort out and prioritize the problems that cause our stress. What’s more, it can be employed as a method to help monitor the causes of everyday stress, so that we can develop better ways to manage them.
Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia
One of the most effective behavioral treatments of insomnia is cognitive treatment, which has long been proven to be as effective as medical treatments. The rationale is that the conscious and subconscious mind can be the biggest enemy when it comes to sleep. That is, our robust cognitive processing ability during the daytime, which plays a beneficial role in planning or critical thinking, turns out to be a disadvantage to sleep. We’ve all experienced the adverse effects of our thoughts on sleep, often generated from anxiety over next-day performance. Cognitive treatment includes techniques devised to enable patients to exercise greater control over what to think about and when to think about it. In a nutshell, you can train yourself to worry about your worries while not in bed; you can also reorganize your thoughts to reduce the impact of disturbing brain activities. CBT for insomnia may involve one or more treatments. Consult with your sleep psychologist to find out the most suitable options to help you get better rest.