I tell my patients some rough version of this:

My agenda is that you get sleep.
My agenda is not that you take your sleep meds the way I prescribe them.
Just don’t take them at a higher dose than prescribed.

When prescribed medication, sometimes my patients tell me they think, from me or from other physicians, that they need to do it exactly as prescribed. And that may be true. With most. But there are some medications, which must be specifically described by one’s prescribing provider, that may be used in the way that the patient determines is most useful. The patient needs to look, to think, to speculate, to reflect. Adjust the medication dosages, and try again.

Going forward, before I tell you how you should sleep and what to take for it, think about how your sleep is.  What are the difficulties you have with sleep?
Falling asleep?
Staying asleep?
Early morning awakenings?
Is your sleep refreshing?

Renaldo, (“Please call me Ren”), can’t fall asleep. He lays there for hours, before he finally falls asleep in the early morning hours.

In Spanish we call the early morning hours “la madrugada”. I’ve always enjoyed that word.

It’s been happening on and off for Ren over the past year, but is worsening lately. He is now afraid to go to sleep. Afraid to looking into the dark night while in the company of his thoughts. He has a feeling of dread as his evening comes around. He finds himself avoiding going to bed.

When dealing with insomnia, first we look at these personal observations. They are called “symptoms,” when they are involved in a pathology, a medical illness.

Then we look at why. Why?

To answer this we consider what regulates sleep in our body and outside of our body. These pathologies we suffer come from what is in our body and as they intersect with what stressors come to them from outside of our body.

There are so many medical illnesses that produce insomnia.
Inversely, there are so many medical illnesses that come from poor sleep.
There are also many behaviors and outside-of-our-body stimuli that affect sleep.
Hmm.  Well it’s not either/or. It is likely a tangle of these roots that make this ugly plant grow.

Where to start?

We have covered sleep hygiene a couple times. Have we made the changes in our home and personal sleep culture to groom our sleep accordingly?

Say we have. We don’t read in bed. We don’t have a TV in our room. We don’t use the bedroom except for sleep and for sex. Hey! Sleeping well is sexy! Ahem….          ….We keep the lights low. We try to go to and out of bed around the same times every day. And so forth.

If these were not attended to, a disease process may develop. It is during sleep that our body heals. None of our body rhythms heal during the day. All the neurotransmitters, chemical messengers, hormones, all of these replenish and regulate into a healthy rhythm during sleep. Also, all of our memories consolidate during sleep. That dumbing in parenting syndrome, which I’ve respectfully labelled “DIPS”, may come more from the broken nights, than by the busy busy kids.

Okay. Say we are practicing good sleep hygiene, yet continue to have poor sleep.

There is a reciprocity between symptoms and disease etiologies. In other words, a broken sleep cycle may trigger certain genes to express themselves, and vua-la! Ren is suffering from an anxiety disorder.

Or, Ren’s anxiety genes become triggered for another reason, maybe simply his age, maybe he has low testosterone, maybe he has a thyroid disease, or he snores, and his circadian rhythm, (ie, sleep cycle,) disrupts. Vua-la! Ren is suffering from a sleep disorder.

It’s like the wheels of my mom-van. I bumped the curb the other day and pinched my tire. I disregarded it, …and the orange hazard like on my dashboard. Don’t judge me.

My steering seemed to wobble over the next hour. I pulled over and sure enough. A flat. I wisely (grimace) decided I could just drive it to the repair shop, rather than get a tow. By the time I got there, my wheel was bent and my van alignment was off. There’s a reciprocity to the wellbeing along with the demise of my van’s health.

In my book, Sleep Well, I cover some of these anxiety illnesses. I don’t cover affective illnesses such as depression, or hormone imbalances, or so many other physical pathologies that are involved in generating poor sleep. They are also reciprocally important to emotional health and a quality of life.

I told Ren,

So what do you think is going on with your sleep?…

Questions:
What are your sleep symptoms?
Do they come from a pathology?
Are they triggering other pathologies?

Self-Care Tip: Sleep Well. Be a friend to yourself.