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The future of Ukraine. The imminent trade war. Stock market turmoil. Consumer prices are rising in the middle of thousands of layoffs, and there are even more layoffs. Whether your politics makes you uneasy or exhilarate by the events of the day, there is no doubt that change and uncertainty generate stress.
Of course, stress can disrupt sleep. For some, the stress can lead to insomnia. Insomnia, you cannot continue to sleep or sleep, or wake up much earlier than desired. Chronic insomnia can lead to serious health issues, such as heart attacks and strokes.
“Everyone has a certain threshold for insomnia. Sometimes the sedimentation factor breaks the threshold and can’t sleep. Stressors can be personal, professional, environmental, even political,” says Anna Krieger, professor of clinical medicine in medicine, neurology and genetic medicine at Weil Cornell Medical College in New York City.
Michelle Drup, a psychologist at the Sleep Disorder Clinic at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, said cases of insomnia tend to rise during previous political and social upheavals.
“I’ve seen this throughout the last few decades,” Drup said. “Many of them are vulnerable people, or people who already have occasional difficulties, which is outweighed them.”
A good sleeper may be more immune to the effects of stress on night sleep, Krieger said. However, continuous stress from the news can turn an occasional bad night of sleep into a real problem for those with fragmented fragmentation of sleep fragmentation (a person with short but frequent awakening).
Age is also a risk factor. Elderly people may be particularly sensitive to additional stress as they may already have sleep problems due to existing health conditions, drugs, and chronic pain. Women also have a higher incidence of insomnia than men, with some families with insomnia, Drerup said.
“There are genetic predispositions, but they also have behavioral implications,” she added. “If I’m in a lagging environment with my parents, it can affect my sleep schedule. The family history of anxiety, especially is another predisposition.”
Occasional insomnia matches are common, said Jennifer Mant, an associate clinical professor of family and preventive medicine at the University of Utah, who watches patients at the school’s sleep wake center.
“Insomnia is a normal response to changes in stress, and even a good change,” says Mundt. “You might get married, get a new job, have a baby, but they still cause stress and can still disrupt your sleep. So it’s very normal to have a temporary match of insomnia. And usually, sleep will return to baseline.”
But Krieger, who is also director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and Newyork-Presbyterian, said some people develop useless habits and ideas about sleep.
“In the end, many people develop what is called a permanent factor, or ways to deal with it. This can often be healthy or poorly sleepy, leading to chronic insomnia,” she said. “There are patients who can’t sleep, they watch the news, they read on the phone. They turn on the lights, they eat. There are even people who play tennis and exercise in the middle of the night.”
Experts encourage people to leave their bed after throwing or turning for 30 minutes, but it is not wise to expose their eyes to the blue light of electronic devices in the middle of the night. By doing so, you simply send a message to your brain that turns off melatonin, the hormone that causes sleepiness, Krieger said.
Eating during the night can lead to heartburn, indigestion and acid reflux, which can disrupt sleep. Exercise in the middle of the night increases your temperature, heart rate, and stress hormones.
Dr. Elizabeth Krelman, a professor of neurology in the Department of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, says one of the worst behaviors people with occasional insomnia can do is worry about it.
“But I can sympathize with that behavior. I don’t know you, but if I’m awake in the middle of the night, I don’t think the horrible things in the world are all bad, no one likes me and I’m not going to fall asleep again.”
“We’ll do that to those who are waking up in the middle of the night, study what’s going on and provide them with more support,” she said.
Experts say there are true techniques that have been tried that will help you get your sleep back on track. First, stop Doomscrolling.
“I talk to a lot of patients about setting up a news curfew,” Munt said. “Check out the news and social media until bedtime doesn’t work. You need an hour of buffer before you track what’s going on and then give it time to sleep.”
Avoid substances like alcohol and drugs and avoid falling over at the end of the day.
“They just make your sleep worse,” Mundt said. “Don’t avoid too much caffeine during the day to make up for the lack of sleep well.
And if you’re always thinking about how to fall asleep, remember that it can make it difficult to fall asleep, Mundt said.
“When people start to develop insomnia, they can stick to it, and that’s a huge source of anxiety,” she said. “Sleep anxiety can become this truly malicious cycle, the main thing that feeds sleep problems.
“Remember, the lasting factor is really your behavior and perception,” she said. “These can help maintain insomnia even when stress is resolved. These vicious cycles we want to see.”
For those in need of expert help, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, named CBT-I, is widely considered a gold standard treatment, Mundt said. One important focus is improving your sleep schedule.
“We’ll track their sleep patterns in the logs and customize their sleep schedules to really adjust their sleep biology, making them more integrated and more consistent,” she said.
Another focus of CBT-I is retraining the brain to see the bed as a welcoming and calm place.
“In the case of insomnia, people spend a lot of time waking up in bed. They become frustrated and anxious, everything is associated with the bed and turns it into this really negative place,” Mundt said.
“This is where we talk about going to bed only if we’re sleepy and asleep and not using the bed for anything other than sleep. “We’re trying to change these negative associations with reconditioning.”
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