Is it REALLY Insomnia?

Do you know the history behind sleep patterns? *sidenote on this blog-it turned into a thesis lol So sorry! I’ll break it down into a few different blogs soon.

Did you know that in Medieval Times, royalty and peasants/serfs (farmers) had completely different sleep habits? It was most productive for farmers to get the best use of the day by using daylight hours to farm their land. They were often too poor to be able to afford candles, and candles wouldn’t help them on the farm anyway. Royalty could afford candles, had huge parties, and did not have the rigid schedule required by the farmers for their ‘production’. Royalty would often sleep when they felt tired. It could be a couple of times a day.

In Europe, the Upper Class in Northern Europe started changing their culture about 200 years ago by sleeping 7-9 hours each night. Thus, starting to change daily culture throughout the Western cultures and starting to cause stress and anxiety over sleep (insomnia). We all have different careers and love different things in life. Is it possible that those innate choices could also be our body choosing, and also flow over to our body’s choice for sleep?

Is your sleep trendy or following the social norm?

So is it really insomnia, or is it that there are times in our lives when our bodies want different sleep styles? Does your body just prefer a different way of sleeping, as “1/3 of our population ‘suffers’ from insomnia”? Anthropologists and some experts have found it is normal for a portion of society to sleep bi-phasic. Some are several hours at night and several during the day. Some can be several earlier in the evening, 8-9 pm bedtime, wake up in the middle of the night and sleep again, 4-5 am until waking time.

Call it bi-phasic, segmented, polyphasic, bi-modal, or insomnia, our body is communicating to us. Our daily lifestyle (culture) doesn’t always allow us to do the individual self-care that our body needs us to do.

Our bodies are communicating in many ways. If we choose to put a label on them, it can change the way our body reacts to the thought of being ‘wrong’ and could inhibit healthy habits.

*I inserted my personal struggle/story at the end (just in case you’d like to skip to that, but this whole document is my AHA moments over the decades).

Why is it happening? Does that matter?

First and foremost: Is it from something physical or something mental?

Physical

• What physical stage of life are you in? Is it hormonal?

• Maybe you are having issues with your bladder or nervous system. See book recommendations “Breath” by James Nestor (mouth breathing)-there can be more to it than bladder or urinary tract issues

• Are you having a health issue? Pain, tension, or a system issue that is minor, but your body feels it more in your sleep?

• Is it allergy season, or is it coming soon? Help for allergies and migraines

• Do you have symptoms of Restless Leg Syndrome and Plantar Fasciitis?

• Do you have an injury from current or long ago that is tightening and restricting your comfortable position?

• Did you eat something that didn’t agree with you?

• Did you eat too late in the evening? Sometimes our body isn’t happy digesting when we sleep.

• Did you have a drink before bed? Alcohol may help you fall asleep, but it doesn’t help you stay asleep for many reasons (sugar, changes in hormones, and facilitates depression/anxiety)

  Emotional

• Do you have a stressful situation at home, at work that your brain is trying to work out?

• Do you have old, nagging emotional or physical issues? Trapped energy, ‘fight or flight’? Sometimes our emotions can trigger physical symptoms that we thought had gone away

• Are you questioning a decision, and your brain is working on it?

  Have you considered that sometimes we just don’t need the same amount of sleep each night and/or at different times of the year?                                                                                               

• Have you checked to see if there is a cycle with the moon, etc?

• Not to add stress because sometimes it’s easier to let go, but just in case, for those that want to learn more, use a sleep journal

  Counting the hours that you WILL get to sleep if you fall asleep now… how many hours I didn’t get to sleep last night isn’t productive. Try to change your view. So many people have different ranges of what their bodies need and different stages of life.

Symptoms That Can Come From or Be Caused by A Not Rested Body-Whether is’s From Your Body Being Stuck in a Vicious Cycle of ‘Fight or Flight’ from Old Trauma or Lack of Sleep causing this Anxiousness in Our Body (I say this and not insomnia for a reason)

• Feeling tired after a night's sleep (it isn’t always that you are awake; it could be restless sleep)

• Daytime fatigue or sleepiness-(check out this adrenal cocktail recipe)

• Irritability, Depression, or anxiety (can come from clenching teeth, old injuries)

• Clenching and grinding our teeth activates our RAS-click here for more information on RAS

• Poor concentration and focus

• Tension headaches (feel like a tight band around the head)

• Difficulty socializing-(not having a higher level of toleration due to nervous system overload)

• Worrying about sleeping-(vicious cycle of overstimulating nerves)

• Gastrointestinal symptoms-(nervous system isn’t getting enough fluid and rest, and has angst)

• Heart Palpitations-(dehydration-same as gastrointestinal system)

• Joint pain-(dehydration)

• Dehydration-WOW! This one in itself has almost all of those symptoms listed above! If we are not in a rested state of sleep, we are using more fluids.  We often don’t want to drink as much, so we don’t have to get up. Hence, the viscous cycle continues.  Check out the book Our Body’s Many Cries for Water

• What other symptoms have you been noticing that may also fit into this category?

  *These symptoms can also be caused by other, sometimes serious issues. Make sure you seek professional medical advice to rule out other serious health issues.        

What to do about it if you need to train or retrain yourself to sleep better

Keep in Mind-Yogi’s will tell you that they need very little sleep, if any. They use meditation to go into the parasympathetic state of mind. I know when I am doing my yoga practice, self-care each day, and detoxing (limiting food, increasing water), I am so productive and don’t need as much time in bed. When I come back from a detox and start adding foods and do one ‘too big a meal too soon’, I’m exhausted. Let’s face it, that doesn’t happen except 4 times a year when I stick with the detox. The more calories in the more the body works, and then it needs rest, and if you add toxins, then it’s even more work.

Things that can help

Whatever you do, do it for more than one night; you may need to set some patterns for yourself for a week to get it together. Our body often needs a month, so stick with it for a month (prescribed pills are the exception to this due to their ingredients). Taking medications can cause inflammation in the body and the long run, cause bigger issues (blog in the process for this). A combination of several of these is usually best.

• Change your language, view, and change your habits to ease your stress over the situation, paying attention to how you feel and not ‘what should be’.

• Magnesium is a great muscle relaxer, and in the cooler areas that aren’t closer to food sources, it’s harder to get magnesium in our diets. Our fields are over-farmed, and when the food sits, it loses its nutrients. Check out The Magnesium Advocacy site for terrific guidance on this.

• Formula 303 with valerian, passiflora magnesium carbonate is one that I’ve found works best for me.

• Get a few CranioSacral Therapy sessions to take out the ‘fight or flight’ that you may have built up in your body over the years. If you are local to Maryland, here’s a link to schedule. If not, here is the Upledger page for ‘find a therapist’.

• Meditation at any point of the day, check and see what works best for you. It will help put your body in the much-needed parasympathetic state that our body is craving when we sleep (the healing state). Click here for our meditation 7-day of lessons and ways to meditate

• Melatonin is to be used temporarily for about 2 weeks to help get your own body’s melatonin to start producing at the right time. You definitely don’t want to use too many milligrams either; too much can cause night terrors (I’ve never experienced this, but feel the need to heed the warning). Here’s an article on health effects, etc, of melatonin.

• Workout and see if that workout needs to be in the morning, afternoon, or evening. Our bodies are all different and at different stages. Yoga and meditation are great in the morning and in the evening. Click here for my morning yoga routine. I love it because I don’t have to get up at all, I just lie there, literally!!

• Stop eating sooner -this can help in many ways. Our body doesn’t want to rest while it needs to digest food, which can cause weight gain issues and keep toxins in our body while we are at rest, and our digestive system is digesting. It doesn’t allow for our body’s natural movement to keep the food moving through our digestive system, causing constipation.

• Change how you feel about it, don’t set an amount of hours, see how you feel when you get up. Pay attention to your body and which aspect needs to be adjusted. Don’t fret about it too much.

• OMG GAME CHANGER for Temperature Issue Sleepers-Get Cozy Earth sheets, pillow cases, and comforter- I do not like to wear pajamas or long sleeves and love the pajamas to lounge in. It’s like being in your own skin. Always cool when you move around, so just a shift allows you to change your whole body temperature. Use this link for a discount code.

What can sleep truly look like?

Wow, let me tell you, I’ve had some doozies of times in my life that have left me sleepless. As a child, I’m told I was the best sleeper, which I remember. I had two babies under two years old, and the youngest was ‘colicky’ since 2 weeks old. She cried all day and screamed starting at 4pm until 3am, then my oldest sweetie realized that she could get time with me between 3am-5am, along with UGHH (Now I love that I had the time with her). My husband at the time was a narcissist and sociopath who needed his time alone. I left with the two babies, still having issues with sleep, and then dealing with being in court every few months with no money and no child support (that went on for 14 years in court for useless issues, but tons of stress).

Always having stress from that relationship and worrying about my kids, I figured I wasn’t going to get any sleep, and went into the fire department. One of the questions in my interview was, “How do you think you’ll be able to do this job with two toddlers when you’ll most likely go 24 hours with no sleep?”. My response, “I do it now and don’t get pay, I at least get an overnight with my bed to myself one night and have income and benefits. “ THAT landed me the most amazing career. My youngest was a wanderer at night, well, all hours; she was sick most of the time (which is why they said ‘colic’ as a baby, that’s a whole other story). So for most of my life, I’ve not slept. I used to say, ‘I have insomnia”. I just thought I slept well enough as a kid. Sometimes it would bother me, and sometimes it wouldn’t. Sometimes, I would find that I got tons done when I didn’t sleep much. In the fire department, I could go 64 hours without more than a catnap nap and sometimes I felt great and sometimes not. It always seemed that if I dwelled on it, I felt worse.

Decades later, I was using a fitbit and so was my hubster (WAY better guy, that does’t take much lol). He falls asleep soooo fast, stays asleep, gets up once in a while for the restroom. Then, he has the audacity to tell me that he didn’t sleep at all according to his Fitbit. WHAT? I was awake all night marathoning the Outlander (darn you FB friends for recommending lol) and was also reading and writing/studying for my CST exam, getting work done and moving all over (sometimes even hunkering down with a bowl of popcorn). We learned his fitbit was picking up my activity and mine would show I slept great. Yet he was telling everyone at work how tired he was because he saw he didn’t sleep.

I was single for almost 10 years before my hubster and it didn’t matter. Once we moved in together, he wanted me in bed with him and it got so hard for me. Then I realized what I used to do before him, homeschooling my kids, working and being single. I started to just put out a few things out before I would go to bed, a book that was relaxing, a project on the computer or building a gong stand or painting some ‘kindness’ rocks. I stopped making it wrong, even though he kept asking me, ‘what woke you up’', ‘what kept you up’. I found that just annoyed me so much, I didn’t want to have to figure it out, was there something to figure out? My work hours and schedule is different than his. He is starting to get more used to it but I just don’t make it wrong anymore. I sleep most nights for 2-3 hours and up for a couple hours and then have my best sleep from 4-5am through 7am (when he is getting up lol). I get my best work done around 2am sometimes. Then I sleep great!

I find my most restful sleep comes (no matter what the hours) when I am getting my yoga in, getting my most daunting tasks done, even if little at a time and getting my CranioSacral Therapy sessions (<<blog link or video link for more info on CST) when needed.

Hot Flashes-As a side note, when going through menopause, that would add even more issues to, waking up or restful sleep. The hot flashes were INSANE sometimes. My hubster was sooo helpful, he did tons of research and found this amazing company that sells sleep products that are made from bamboo! Game changer- many of my patients and friends have purchased them as well and swear by them Cozy Earth.-there’s a discount in this link.

As always, feel free to reach out to us

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Your body may be solving problems in your head while you are sleeping and need you to take thought provoking action to work through it and then settle back down and get more solid sleep once it’s solved. It could be trying to communicate an issue with you. It’s good to take a look at a pattern, try not to make it wrong though. If you decide to overthink or under-think, that’s up to you. You may want to come back here and read this again because it may appear different to you in a month or two when you’re in a different stage of life.

In Health and Wellness,

Michelle S Krause LMT, CST-T

Owner of Vital Fitness Holistic Center

www.vitalfitnessholisticcenter.com