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| Sleeping Sicknessess | Accelerated Aging
When laboratorial animals are deprived of sleep, they expose to infections, their hair falls out and they rapidly waste away. “It could be a faster aging process or it could be an immune system gone haywire. “There are so many hormonal changes that are dependent on a normal sleep-wake pattern. Many things go wrong if you don’t sleep properly.”
Hormone growth is suppressed, for example, in people who don’t experience deep sleep.
Kids with sleep apnea - who sleep poorly because they frequently stop breathing - are often small as a result. Adults notice changes in their fat-to-muscle ratio, which means more sagging and the likelihood of middle-aged paunch.
Sleep Therapies
The solutions to sleeplessness are better than ever, but it helps to understand the nature of your problem. Most of the people are, at some point, unable to sleep for a short period of time.
It could be triggered by grief, hardship, jet lag, divorce or pressures at work. Most people get over it quickly. But for some, sleep trouble lasts longer. As depression is a chief cause of chronic insomnia, you might need to treat that first.
A few steps you can take to solve sleep problems include exercising - but not within three hours of bedtime - and staying awake. Insomniacs shouldn’t nap: It can sap your weak sleep drive.
So, go to bed at night only when you’re drowsy, and force yourself out of bed if you don’t drift off within 20 minutes or if you wake up and can’t get back to sleep within 20 minutes.
The most insomniacs need is to break the panicky association between bed and sleeplessness. People who have insomnia tend to spend a lot of time in bed even if they don’t sleep. They toss and turn, which makes them more anxious and less likely to get to sleep.
Sleep experts in Canada and abroad have had remarkable success recently using cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), which combines relaxation techniques, basic psychotherapy and “sleep restriction”—actually a restriction of the time spent in bed. At sleep clinic, 85 percent of CBT participants have cut their insomnia symptoms by at least 75 percent.
Two big studies, one in Scotland and one in the United States, indicate that people treated with sleeping pills revert to their dysfunctional sleep patterns within one to two years after treatment.
After CBT, fully 80 percent of those who’d been habitually using sleeping pills were drug-free after ten weeks. Seventy percent remained drug-free one year later.
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