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Last week I was heading to Dean & Deluca, making my daily jaunt for java, when I sensed that something wasn’t quite right. I quickly looked down to see that my dress was inside out, revealing every seam and stitch. I call these days a wash. The days you catch every red light and your brain feels like viscous jelly with a working memory that can’t hold more than your first and last name.
“I’ll just get some sleep and start fresh tomorrow,” I told myself. But what if something impeded me from racking up those hours of rest? The time we relinquish consciousness on our cushy pillows is surely an inalienable right. But with every self-evident truth come potential obstacles. In the case of sleep disorders, there are over eighty on the horizon, wreaking havoc on countless tired eyes.
Dyssomniatic disorders like insomnia and narcolepsy are the most common. These ailments affect both quantity and quality of sleep. While nearly 40 percent of the population has experienced acute sleeplessness—suffering transient symptoms for less than a month—at some point in their lives, 10 to 15 percent suffer from chronic insomnia, enduring sleep issues that last longer than a month. To qualify for this diagnosis, one’s sleep disturbance and daytime fatigue must significantly impair his or her life. Other conditions include irritability and excessive anxiety about sleeping.
While these symptoms are often typical of other ailments as well, such as depression and stress disorders, sleep specialists can discern whether the disorder is sleep-related in nature by conducting clinical interviews. For ideal results, the most effective treatments combine cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) with a process known as sleep hygiene.
Through CBT, patients come to understand how sleep cycles work and are given techniques to help them change their negative sleeping attitudes. Patients learn to substitute sweeping statements like, “I have to get seven hours of sleep tonight, or I won’t be able to go to work tomorrow,” with positive and realistic views like, “I can still go to work tomorrow, and I’ll make up for the lack of sleep tomorrow night.”
Sleep hygiene behaviors also help treat insomnia. Patients are taught sleep-promoting behaviors such as exercising regularly (up to three hours before bedtime) and going to sleep at the same time each night. Clinicians also stress the importance of not forcing sleep: If it’s been longer than thirty minutes and you still feel restless, remove yourself from bed and retreat to a different space to undertake a relaxing activity (for example, reading) until you can’t keep your eyes open. Since the bedroom often becomes a source of anxiety for insomniacs, other techniques like yoga and meditation focus on softening muscles. Medication should be the last resort for chronic insomniacs, since failure to correct the root of the problem could prolong its persistence for years.
While insomniacs wish they slept a little more, those suffering from narcolepsy would like to sleep less. You know that feeling on Thanksgiving when you’ve overdosed on tryptophan and you’re quickly considering hunkering down at the dining room table? Narcolepsy is like Thanksgiving every day, minus the thanks.
These sleepers suffer from excessive daytime tiredness, periodic sleep attacks, and occasional loss of muscle consciousness, known as cataplexy. Sudden emotions like laughter or anger precipitate cataplexy: Imagine being mid-argument and suddenly losing all feeling in your legs before collapsing to the floor. These episodes last nearly thirty seconds and, at the very least, make the diagnosis easier, since cataplexy is unique to narcoleptics.
Those who lack cataplexy are trickier to diagnose, though, causing some narcoleptics to go undiagnosed for years. To find out whether one qualifies as narcoleptic, diagnostic testing in a sleep disorder center is necessary. Patients who lack cataplexy but suffer from excessive fatigue to the extent that they can no longer perform at school or work would likely benefit from seeing a sleep specialist.
Currently, the most effective, last-resort treatments for nearly all sleep disorders are stimulant medications. Our bodies need sleep like they need water, which makes finding the right remedy essential. In fact, those who are deprived of sleep for longer than one hundred hours experience hallucinations, paranoia and behaviors resembling mental illness. But getting too much shut-eye isn’t productive for our social lives, either. It’s important to seek help in any capacity so that when the moon rises to a new night, we’re able to attain what this nation stands for: life, liberty, and the pursuit of sleep.
