Improving Your Sleep – Dr. Norman Swan

by | Sleep, Wellness

sleepiness
Identifying the causes of a broken nights rest or why you aren’t as refreshed and alert in the morning requires reassesing your bedtime habits and potentially speaking to your GP or sleep clinic.

People often wanna know about their sleep and are anxious about their nights rest. They say, oh, I’m not getting eight hours sleep a night, that means I’m gonna get dementia. And they wanna get a better night’s rest.

You’ve only got a problem with your sleep if you’ve got a problem with your sleep. In other words, it’s affecting your life. You are not feeling great in the morning and you’re not working well, or you’re falling asleep at the wheel. There are lots of causes of a poor night’s rest. Some of these include not having a dark bedroom, not doing the right stuff before you go to bed. There are various reasons to having an interrupted rest at night.

I can’t go into all of the reason on a bad nights rest in this talk. You need to take a systematic approach to your sleeping. You need to consider your bedtime hygiene; what you do in your bedroom, are the lights on, are you getting distracted or using a screen in the middle of the night and what time you’re going to bed? Are going to bed late enough that you get an unbroken night’s sleep?

I am abbreviating what’s quite a complicated process of assessment and diagnosis. You could potentially have sleep apnea and that’s what’s causing the problem. You just have to analyse get it sorted out. And at mydr.com we have some good articles and advice on sleep health.

Dr Norman Swan, Physician and Journalist