May 18 2008
Chronic Pain and Sleeping
Sleep is crucial to life. For chronic pain sufferers it is even more vital. Sleep restores your energy and keeps away fatigue. Getting less sleep than you need creates a sleep debt and this sleep loss will reduce your immune system. This decrease in immunity can cause illness or more pain in your daily life. It is a vicious cycle. You can’t sleep then you get sick and that sickness causes you not to be able to sleep.
Chronic pain conditions can cause more dreaming than normal people would do. They are also more apt, due to their medicines and conditions, to have nightmares. These nightmares can disrupt the normal sleep patterns and create disturbances in pattern and quality of sleep.
Sleep Stages
There are definite stages to sleep. The time just before you drift off to sleep is called the hypnogogic stage. The period just after sleep when you are beginning to wake up is called the hypnopompic stage. Then there is REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. In this stage is where dreaming takes place. In REM sleep there is a loss of muscle tone called “flaccid paralysis”. This is where the body cannot move, so you can’t be dreaming and tossing and turning at the same time.
Sleep Disturbances
You may have had some sleep issues prior to having your chronic pain condition or it may have come on after your diagnosis. Whatever the case, your pain will worsen any sleep issues you have had in the past. There are a couple of sleep disturbances you can have; one is called insomnia and the other is alpha-delta sleep anomaly.
In alpha-delta sleep anomaly the alpha waves that are usually happening during the waking hours will come in to your sleep. Delta brain waves are the deeper levels of sleep. Having high levels of these alpha waves during sleep will make you more sensitive to pain.
In insomnia, you just can’t sleep right. You’ll have trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep. Stress is the leading cause of most insomnia cases and there are three basic types. There is sleep onset insomnia where you have difficulty falling asleep. Maintenance insomnia is where you will wake up in the middle of the night and have difficulty falling back asleep. Lastly, there is early a.m. insomnia where you will wake up early and not be able to fall back asleep.
How to Get to Sleep
Journaling. Writing in a journal while lying in bed can ease your mind from stress and make you drowsy. This will have a two fold affect for the chronic pain sufferer in that you are able to remove stress from your body, and get a better nights sleep.
Meditate before bedtime. Another way of relaxing both your body and your mind from the day to day activities is to meditate prior to going to sleep. It may require you to do this several times before you see results.
Turn your lights down. About an hour or so before you are going to go lie down for bedtime, try lessening your light. Dimmer switches work great for this. Dial the brightness level down and you may find yourself nodding off earlier than if you were still in your usual light.
Keep to your schedule. This is an easy one that usually gets overlooked. Don’t vary your sleeping schedule. Don’t go to bed too many hours early or sleep hours late. This will alter your patterns and cause disruptions later.
