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You can eat right, exercise, and do all good things for your body,sleep but if you’re not sleeping well, vitality will still elude you. Maybe you want to have better nutrition and enough energy to work out but you don’t because you just can’t get a decent night of rest. At Swetech Medical Center in Clinton Township, we help our patients figure out why sleep is so hard to come by, and what can be done to help them achieve quality rest every night.
Lifestyle and Environmental Factors That Impact
When you don’t get quality rest, your body will suffer. Muscling through busy days after nights of restlessness is the fast track to burnout and sickness. Every person needs adequate sleep to function properly, but there are many factors that can get in the way, like:
- Blue light exposure: If you spend hours on your phone or computer before bed, you’re overstimulating your brain. It doesn’t matter if you’re mindlessly playing a game, scrolling through social media, or composing work emails, anything that involves blue light exposure interrupts the body’s natural wind-down, blocks the body from producing the melatonin it needs to get sleepy, and shifts circadian rhythms.
- Stimulants: Anything that increases your alertness and affects the central nervous system is considered a stimulant, and that can make it difficult for you to get to sleep. Coffee, certain drugs, and – for some people – alcohol can rev up brain activity and make it difficult to get sleepy at a decent time to get enough hours of REM sleep.
- Misalignment: Poor posture can lead to misaligned vertebrae and vice versa. Sleeping in the wrong position can twist your body out of whack. Problems like these can cause discomfort and pain, making it difficult to get comfortable in bed and fall easily to sleep.
It’s easy enough to tweak lifestyle and environmental factors like these so you can improve sleep naturally – limit phone time, cut out caffeine after lunch, change the pillows you use. But, when efforts like these aren’t enough, it’s a sign that something else is going on that’s getting in the way of well-deserved rest.
Causes of Poor
There are many possible causes of poor sleep, including:
- Insomnia: When you have trouble falling or staying asleep, whether the condition is chronic or short-term.
- Night Sweats: Waking feeling extremely hot or with damp clothes, often an underlying cause of illness, menopause, or a medication.
- Sleep Apnea: Repeated pauses in breathing pattern during sleep caused by the collapse of the airway.
- Snoring: Soft tissues in the nose or throat vibrate when you breathe, sometimes a major symptom of sleep apnea.
- Restless Leg Syndrome: An uncontrollable urge to move the legs.
- Mental Health: Depression, anxiety, or stress, with or without medication.
Poor sleep can contribute to multiple health problems, including stroke, high blood pressure, heart disease, depression, and anxiety. It’s not just quality rest you’re working toward when you go to your doctor for help with sleeplessness, it’s your overall health and wellness.
Achieve Better Rest with Help from Swetech Medical
Sometimes, it can be difficult to figure out that sleeplessness is the culprit behind your overall malaise or unwellness. You could be suffering from anything from irritability to weight gain and the whole time you’re trying to figure out the cause, the reason could simply be due to a lack of sleep. The body is complicated, and your doctor of osteopathy will look at you as a whole, not just put a bandage on your symptoms.
Sleep disorders are common, and sleep aids are overprescribed. They have merit in some situations, but at Swetech Medical Center, in Clinton Township, our goal is to help you finetune your wellness through non-invasive, drug-free, non-surgical methods whenever possible so you can improve your sleep naturally. Contact us to discuss your concerns.
