Losing Money Is Leading To Losing sleep
Rob Anderson knows he’s going to soon be out of a job. He’s trying not to lose any sleep worrying about it.
Anderson, a 24-year-old Mays Landing resident, works the later shift at the Office Depot in Mays Landing. The local store is closing, but amidst closeout bargain signs and several empty shelves, Anderson has to keep working to pay his car and utility bills until he’s hired somewhere else.
Six or seven hours of sleep a night is the norm for Anderson. He attributes the lower amount of sleep to working the later shift, but that doesn’t mean he’s ignoring the fact he should be getting more sleep.
“Maybe I’m losing a little bit of sleep,” Anderson said. “There’s more of a chance that I don’t sleep.”
Many Americans aren’t getting enough sleep, and it seems to be due to stress over the troubled economy. That was the verdict from a National Sleep Foundation survey released earlier this month.
According to the annual survey, 27 percent of 1,000 adults surveyed were losing sleep several nights a week due to stress over the economy. The survey also found that 20 percent of people get six hours of sleep or fewer per night, while only 28 percent of people got at least the recommended eight hours of sleep.
Those numbers have increased steadily from 2001, when the survey found only 13 percent of people got six hours or fewer sleep, and 38 percent slept for eight hours or more.
Having difficulty falling or staying asleep, whether it’s for a week or for a lifetime, is referred to as insomnia. Chronic insomnia happens when the inability to fall asleep lasts for more than three weeks. Acute insomnia describes sleeplessness that persists over a couple of days.
There’s a lot of basic causes for sleeplessness – women and people older than 60 seem to be more prone to sleep disorders – but stress, anxiety and depression are among the most common causes of sleep problems, and all of them seem to accompany economic woes.
The problems begin when people can’t tune out from the problems before they go to bed.
“Focusing on worries is the root of sleeplessness,” said Kenneth A. Leight, director of psychology at the Bacharach Institute for Rehabil-itation in Galloway Township.
Think of it like nature’s fight or flight response. Because the mind is focused on something that’s causing a person trouble, that person’s body is keeping them awake, thinking they’ll need to spring into action to fight that anxiety.
Leight performs psychological exams on patients who have difficulty sleeping. After ruling out physical causes such as sleep apnea – a sleeping disorder where a person’s breathing is halted during sleep – Leight can examine what a person can do to have a better night’s sleep.
Sometimes, it’s a matter of changing habits right before bedtime. If your solution to dealing with economic stress is to drink or smoke your problems away, those behaviors can impact the quality of your sleep.
Even though alcohol is a depressant and acts quickly to slow the body down, the body metabolizes alcohol over a couple of hours. After a few hours into deep sleep, the body can be awakened by the byproducts of alcohol reacting in the body.
Alcohol can also suppress rapid eye movement, or REM. That REM cycle is an important part of a person’s circadian rhythm, or biological clock, and removing one essential element of the sleep cycle can mess up the rest of it.
Even those with jobs who feel economically safe and secure can still have a bad night’s sleep. According to Dr. William Bradway, a board certified pulmonologist and sleep medicine specialist with Cape Regional Medical Center in Cape May Court House, shift work plays a large role in disturbing a normal sleep schedule.
Bradway said a person should try to wake up and fall asleep at the same time every day. The routine helps the body to naturally relax itself when bedtime comes. With the kinds of shifts Anderson works at Office Depot, a person can go to bed and wake up at all different times during the week.
Doing homework in bed or lying down to listen to music can cause the body to associate the bed with things other than sleeping, Bradway said. When a person’s head hits the pillow, there shouldn’t be anything left on that person’s mind.
“Do something relaxing,” Bradway said. “Don’t associate your bed with clock watching.”
Changing bedtime behavior to alleviate acute insomnia seems to do the trick. Leight estimated most of his patients are fine after making one or two small changes in their daily habits. However, a prescription drug is sometimes needed.
In 2005, 43 million people filled prescriptions for sleeping pills. Drugs such as Ambien and Lunesta are very popular, but they also carry the risk of addiction. They are Schedule IV controlled substances, meaning they aren’t quite as addictive as narcotics, but they can become addictive.
For people with acute insomnia, Bradway recommended a sleep drug called Rozerem. Studies haven’t linked Rozerem to the same sort of dependency as other drugs.
Once a solution is found to sleep problems, it should be something natural. Sleep isn’t something that happens exactly when you want it to, so ultimately, people need to leave enough time to let themselves enter their own personal slumberland.
“If you’re waiting until just before going to bed to wind down, you’re going to be waiting a long time,” Leight said.
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