Disturbed Sleep

Disturbed sleep is really common with this syndrome. One lady I know hadn't bothered to use her bedroom for more than four years because she just couldn't sleep and found trying pointless, instead cat-napping and making do with a few snatched minutes in a chair when she could. That's incredibly damaging. Even if this was the only problem, it would be significant, and coupled with the rest of the syndrome, it's debilitating. 

Sleep is underrated in our time-poor society and yet it is the best recharge our bodies get. Your body needs good, restful, deep sleep every night, for 8 hours, possibly longer. I know a lot of people will challenge this, saying they only need 5 or 6, and one or two recent articles have suggested we can get by on 2-3 hours but this is lunacy. 

Sufficient sleep is a must for anyone. For someone suffering from a condition like the one I describe on this blog, it's essential to any kind of recovery. Remember, this is a body under attack from an unnatural syndrome. It needs to rebuild. Sleep is key.

Sounds simple, but for some, it's incredibly hard to achieve.  As with other symptoms of this syndrome, the cause is a misplaced chemical response causes the body to react in an unnatural way, being awake in the middle of the night when we desperately want to sleep. 

I suffered 5 years with hardly any useful sleep, lying awake each night no matter how physically tired I was.

What Causes this?

High levels of insulin, and the hyper response to carbohydrates eaten during the day lead to levels of cortisol and adrenaline rising inappropriately. Cortisol and adrenaline are brilliant when they are released during the day, firing the energy that we need to get the job done, run for the bus, get out of bed in the morning. 

Often, the inappropriate production of adrenaline and cortisol means that levels will peak between 2am and 4am, the time when it's supposed to be at its lowest, waking the sufferer and often with acute anxiety, mind racing, with an overload of negative thoughts, and sleep is impossible. 

In most cases, it then takes a couple of hours for levels to subside (which could be 5 or 6am)  and then I want to go back to sleep again, unhelpful in the extreme if you drop off at 6am and need to get up at 7am, especially having had maybe only 3 or 4 hours broken sleep!

The breaks in sleep also prevent the body from entering the deepest sleep phases, when the most good is done - in my case I don’t think I got to this stage at all more than once or twice a month, which was like a form of torture, both on a mental and a physical level.

Of course, being tired is a problem in itself, which then negatively impacts on anxiety levels/ability to cope the following day. Most people sleep badly occasionally, but repeated night after night and week after week, a downward spiral develops. 

Treatments?

The best treatments for this are those described on this blog, which deal with the underlying causes, not just the effect of not sleeping. It's not good enough to just take a sleeping pill, as it doesn't deal with the causes. Sticking plasters such as these are just not able to fix the underlying issues. There needs to be a strategy, the problem needs to be taken seriously. Take a look at my post on sleep as medicine for some ideas. http://fixmypcos.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/sleep.html