Sleep Disorders - Diagnosis and Treatment
Sleep and rest are essential to our overall health and well-being. If you think you have a problem with continuous sleep cycles or are unable to sleep well at night, it is advisable to consult a doctor without delay.
Sleep disorders may be caused by a variety of reasons like lifestyle habits, medication, schedules, emotional stress, physical impairments etc.
To accurately spot the reasons for sleep disorder, the doctor may suggest a series of tests. You need to cooperate with the doctor and help him to identify the different factors that could contribute to it so that he can suggest proper treatment.
If the causes are related to food, travel or exercise, alterations in lifestyle can help overcome sleep deprivation. If any medicines that you regularly take could be the cause, the doctor can prescribe alternate medicine.
Stress or emotionally challenging situations can also result in sleep disorders, in which case the doctor can suggest medication or therapy involving hypnosis. Physical disabilities that cause difficulties in sleeping may need to be treated through surgery.
The following sections describe the diagnosis and treatments for sleep disorders:
A Sleep Diary is one of the best and foremost ways of diagnosing sleep disorders, because it can help in identifying causes that arise from the person’s lifestyle.
A Sleep Diary is a very useful log for recording daily occurrences that could aid or disrupt sleep. To maintain a sleep diary, note down each and every activity of a day against its time. These should include food, medicine, stressful situations, exercises, travel and other routines.
The diary should also include how you slept each night. Ideally, keeping the sleep diary for a month will help you identify what could be causing sleep difficulties.
In a month, you may begin to notice a pattern: there may be certain elements that contribute to sleeplessness like a particular food or drink, a certain kind of anxiety or pressure you experienced at work or irregular food habits. There may also be factors that aid a good night’s sleep.
Once the reasons for sleep disorder are identified, the doctor will suggest various treatments as a part of the therapy.
If the disorder cannot be cured by altering lifestyle or prescribing different medicine, one of the next options is hypnosis wherein the person enters into a different state of consciousness and responds to images or voice of the hypnotizer.
This helps the mind to let go of worries and attain deep of sleep. This kind of treatment is very useful in cases that originate from tension, and where the symptoms are bed-wetting in children, nightmares, sleep walking etc.
When the options mentioned above, viz., changes in lifestyle, medication and hypnosis are not effective in repairing sleeping disorder, surgery may be the only possible solution.
Surgery may have to be seriously considered if the reasons of sleep deprivation are diagnosed to be arising from physical disabilities, or for conditions like snoring or sleep apnea.
Sleep apnea is a condition in which the person stops breathing for a few seconds at a time, throughout the night, due to some block in the air passage or because the brain fails to transmit signals to the diaphragm to breathe. The surgery to treat sleep apnea involves removing the obstructions around the nose and throat.