Sleep Disruptions
While chronic sleeplessness has obvious problems, even occasional sleeping problems can make daily life feel more stressful or cause productivity to decrease. It can cause a lack of concentration and a reduction in the ability to handle minor tasks. Overall, sleep loss has been found to impair the ability to perform tasks involving memory, learning and logical reasoning. This can cause problems at school as well as on the job. It has been found to be a significant predictor of absenteeism. Lost productivity due to sleepiness has been estimated to cost the national economy as much as $100 billion annually.
What are the biggest causes for losing sleep?
According to most sleep experts, the No. 1 cause of short-term sleep difficulties is stress. Common triggers could include school or job related pressures, a serious illness or a death in the family, and relationship problems. Usually sleep problems disappear when the stressful situation ends. If, however, short-term sleep problems are not dealt with from the beginning, they can persist much longer.
Your lifestyle may be causing some sleeplessness without you realizing it.
Activities such as exercising close to bedtime, working or doing other intense mental activities right before getting into bed, drinking caffeine or alcohol in the afternoon or evening may be getting in the way of a good night's sleep. Avoiding these activities before bedtime will help to decrease insomnia.
Another stress factor that inhibits sleep is shift working – as many as 20% of employees in the United States work nighttime or irregular shifts. This disruption in the normal sleep pattern and biological rhythms can cause chronic insomnia. Shift workers are more likely to fall asleep on the job. Although the body never adjusts to shift work, you can minimize the effects, by creating an ideal bedroom environment for sleep.
Jet lag also can cause a stress on the body.
When you cross several time zones your body is out of sync and sleep can become disrupted. Try to shift your sleep and wake times gradually to the new schedule a few days before you leave home and adopt the sleep/wake cycle of your destination upon arrival.
Excerpted from http://www.sleepfoundation.org
See our article on Keys to Good Sleep and The Perfect Bedroom for Sleep for tips on how to minimize or eliminate these sleep disruptors.
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