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Sleep is an essential part of being healthy. Lack of sleep can have significant effects on a number of different areas of your health and well-being, having both physical and psychological side effects. Research has found that not getting enough sleep is linked to an elevated risk for a number of medical conditions, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, obesity, and depression just to name a few. The exact amount of sleep we need each night varies between individuals, but on average children from 5 – 10 years old need 10-11 hours, teenagers from 10 – 17 years old need 8.5 – 9.5 hours, and adults need 7 – 9 hours. It is important to remember that if your sleep pattern does not fall within these ranges it does not mean you have a sleep disorder or insomnia. Some people get enough rest from 6 hours a night, while others need 10 hours. If you frequently feel unrested, tired, and fatigued, you should make sure you are getting good sleep. People with insomnia are unable to fall asleep or unable to stay asleep to attain the required amount of sleep they need each night.
According to the National Institutes of Health, it is estimated that 50 to 70 million Americans have some form of sleep-related problem. Sleep disorders are very common, affecting men and women of all ages and socioeconomic class. A recent national survey found that 30% of adults reported getting 6 hours or less sleep per night. Before being diagnosed with insomnia, your doctor will likely try to rule out other possible health conditions that could be interfering with your sleep, such as medications or undetected illness. Insomnia can be occasional, can last up to 3 weeks, or be a long-lasting, chronic condition. The most common symptoms of insomnia are trouble falling asleep on a regular basis, feeling fatigued during the day, waking up several times during the night, and not feeling refreshed when waking. One of the biggest challenges of insomnia is the cumulative effect of poor sleep, adding to frustration and fatigue to the point that it can affect your ability to perform normal activities during the day.
A number of factors can contribute or worsen the symptoms of insomnia. Lifestyle can influence your ability to sleep, especially inconsistent sleep habits, working evening or night shifts, or trying to sleep in noisy or bright environments. Use of medications, drugs, and alcohol can also affect your ability to sleep. Another contributing factor may involve the ingestion of foods or drinks with stimulants in them like caffeine from coffee, energy drinks, diet pills, or even cold or allergy medications. Stress is another common cause for insomnia, especially for long-term exposure to stress. Various health issues can also have a negative impact on your sleep patterns, including anxiety disorders, depression, pain, or discomfort. HealtheHuman provides you all the tools you need to track and analyze all the effects of insomnia on your health. Our integrated health trackers and comprehensive history gives you one site to help you measure the quality of your sleep, find influencers, track treatments, and easily report your progress with your doctors.
Key Health Information to Track for Insomnia
Insomnia is all about your sleep patterns, but that is much more than the number of hours slept each night. A number of factors can interfere with falling or staying asleep, such as noise, interruptions, restlessness, nightmares, hot flashes, apnea, snoring, tossing and turning, or getting up to urinate. Another influence can be your ability to “quiet your thoughts” or stop worrying, thinking about problems or concerns and drift off to sleep. Getting to the root of your insomnia could require tracking all of your sleep patterns and related symptoms in detail. The Sleep Tracker in HealtheHuman provides a powerful set of tools to log the duration, quality, and many other important factors in your sleep patterns. Charting and reporting features help you analyze your sleep patterns to look for trends, triggers, and other insights.
Fear of not being able to fall asleep may lead to a “learned insomnia” or “conditioned insomnia.” Anxiety levels can interfere with your ability to fall asleep or can increase the frequency of disturbing dreams. Feeling worried, scared, anxious, hopeless, or sad can all interfere with getting restful sleep. Tracking your moods and stress levels can be an important part of treating insomnia. HealtheHuman includes an extensive Mood Tracker that allows you to keep detailed accounts of how you are feeling throughout the hours of the day and night. The Stress Tracker can help you log stress levels and influencers, revealing opportunities to incorporate relaxation or other preventative measures to reduce the impact on your sleep. Sharing information about your moods and stress levels might also help your doctors or other health advisors make more effective treatment recommendations.
Sometimes other lifestyle habits can have an impact on your sleep. Activities like using a computer, reading a book, or watching television right before going to bed can over-stimulate you and interfere with your ability to fall asleep. With the Quicktags Tracker, you can log any potential activity or influencer on your sleep. By monitoring your activities before bedtime, you might discover correlations that are making it difficult to relax and fall asleep. You can create your own custom quicktag and track the time of the activity, the intensity from 1 to 10, and the duration. Customizable reports and charting options make it easy to analyze, review, and share all the information you track.
Difficulties concentrating, fatigue, low energy levels, memory problems, and attention problems are all common symptoms of insomnia, especially for prolonged episodes of sleeplessness. HealtheHuman lets you track all of your symptoms so you can look for changes, both positive and negative, as you try different treatment options. The Symptom Tracker allows you to log each symptom for each hour of the day on a scale of 1 to 10. All of the symptom data tracked can be analyzed with powerful charting and report options.
A number of foods can stimulate the body and make it difficult to sleep. Depending on how your body metabolizes caffeine, drinking coffee, energy drinks, or similar drinks can keep your heart rate and blood pressure elevated for hours. You might also want to watch your intake of foods high in salt near bedtime, especially from packaged foods which commonly have high levels of sodium. High levels of sugar near bedtime can also increase energy levels and make it difficult to fall or stay asleep. Tracking your diet throughout the day can help you see if you are taking in high levels of sugar, sodium, or caffeine and reveal potential dietary changes to improve your sleep. HealtheHuman’s Diet and Nutrition Tracker includes over 40,000 foods, including a number of popular packaged foods and restaurant meals so you can build an accurate log of your foods and nutrition levels.
A lack of exercise can interfere with your sleep, but so can exercising too late in the day. It is important to incorporate regular exercise and activities into your day, but be careful not to get too much activity close to bedtime. If your schedule includes working out at the end of the day, you might want to change to a morning or early afternoon routine to give your body more recovery time before trying to sleep. The Exercise and Workout Tracker helps you log all of your daily activities, exercises, and workouts.
High or elevated blood pressure at bedtime can impact your ability to fall and stay sleep. Whether caused by food, stress, medications, or an underlying medical condition, high blood pressure can be interfering with your sleep patterns. In addition, sleep disorders increases your risk for hypertension, stroke, coronary disease, and cardiac arrhythmias. You should regularly check your blood pressure, especially at bedtime and when waking. The Blood Pressure Tracker helps you log all of your readings, including flags to mark waking and bedtime readings. Charting and reporting features help you quickly analyze and share your blood pressure data with your doctor.
Being overweight or obese can significantly increase your risk for sleep disorders, including sleep apnea. Sleep apnea causes frequent interruptions throughout the night, which can cause insomnia. While often interfering with restful sleep, insomnia might increase your risk for obesity. Recent studies have discovered that short sleep durations result in a metabolic change that may be linked to obesity. 77% of obese adults report some form of sleep problem. Studies have also shown increased cravings for carbohydrates after getting a poor night’s sleep. There are a number of features in HealtheHuman to help you lose weight or maintain a healthy weight, including the Diet and Nutrition Tracker, the Exercise and Workout Tracker, and the Body Measurement Tracker.
It is important to keep track of the medications and prescriptions you are taking, especially when discussing treatment options for your insomnia with your physicians and health advisors. Providing detailed records of all your medications, vitamins and supplements will be an important part of their treatment plan and recommendations. Frequently doctors will prescribe medications to help with sleep, however it is important to watch for dangerous interactions and side-effects from these medications. Your doctor needs a thorough history of your medications and supplements, especially any over-the-counter sleep pills or supplements containing melatonin that you might be using. HealtheHuman provides daily trackers to log all of your medication and supplement usage, as well as a complete medication history feature to keep accurate records of all your past prescriptions.
Keeping your doctors informed on your medical history and key aspects of your lifestyle is an important part of your care, and could have an impact on their course of treatment. Insomnia is often linked to other health conditions, so it is important to provide detailed records of any past medical conditions, procedures, surgeries, hospitalizations, or any other relevant aspect of your health. Lifestyle can also influence your insomnia including your stress levels, work schedules, major life changes, or another source of stress or anxiety. Frequent travel can also have a profound effect on your sleep cycles, significant changes in time zones that might disrupt your circadian rhythms. The various health history features of HealtheHuman can help you build and share your comprehensive health history with all your health advisors.
Other Things You Can Do to Help Manage Insomnia
If you are not sleeping, make sure to talk to your doctor about it. Sleep is an important part of your health and not getting enough quality sleep increases your risks for a number of health conditions. Work with you doctor to help rule out other possible causes and come up with an effective plan of treatment. One of the main reasons to log all of this information is to create more effective and meaningful visits with your doctors, specialists, and other health advisors. Use the various tools in HealtheHuman to help quantify how well you are sleeping and what else is going on in your health and life that could be contributing to your insomnia.
Practicing good sleep habits is one of the most important things you can do to improve your insomnia. This starts by maintaining a consistent sleep schedule. Go to bed at the same time every night, even on the weekends. Set the alarm and get up at the same time each morning, every day. This consistency will help set your body's natural rhythm and synchronize your sleep cycles.
Make sure your environment is quiet, dark, and comfortable so you can sleep. Maintaining a comfortable room temperature is also very important to getting and staying asleep. The room should be cool enough to fall asleep but not so cold it causes shivering or discomfort. Your environment needs to be warm enough to be comfortable and not so hot that you are sweating or shedding off blankets and sheets to cool down.
It is important to stay active and get exercise, but make sure it is not too close to bedtime. Give your body at least a few hours to recover before trying to sleep.
Only use your bed for sleep and sex. Try to avoid spending time in bed doing other activities like reading, watching television, working on the computer, or doing work. You want to make your bed the place to get restful sleep.
Don’t eat for three hours before bedtime. A number of foods can increase your alertness or energy levels, as well as stimulate the digestive system.
Medications and supplements frequently contain ingredients that might affect your ability to get to sleep. Over-the-counter and prescription cold and allergy medications frequently contain decongestants, caffeine, and other stimulants that can increase your heart rate and interfere with falling asleep. These medications are frequently made to work over long periods of time, so even though you take them in the morning they can still be in your system at night. Diet pills and supplements frequently contain caffeine, ginseng, and other stimulates to suppress the appetite. Certain vitamins, supplements, and even energy drinks contain various forms of stimulant as well. Make sure to read the labels on foods and drinks to see if they contain any caffeine or other stimulant, especially if they are a regular part of your diet late in the day.
An overnight sleep study (called a polysomnography) might be helpful in understanding your insomnia, especially to rule out other sleep disorders like sleep apnea. A number of sleep centers and clinics can help monitor your body temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, brain waves, eye movement, and other measurements to help you understand your sleep patterns and disruptions.
Other Resources
U.S. National Library of Medicine, Insomnia
U.S. Center for Disease Control, Sleep Disorders
National Sleep Awareness Roundtable
U.S. Center for Disease Control, Insufficient Sleep is a Public Health Epidemic
Medical Disclaimer: All information on this site is of a general nature and is furnished for your knowledge and understanding only. This information is not to be taken as medical or other health advice pertaining to your specific health and medical condition.
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