Common Reasons Why People Have Trouble Sleeping and What You Can Do to Get A Good Night’s Sleep

In a 2003 report released by the National Commission on Sleep Disorders, it was found that over $ 150 billion was lost each year due to decreased worker productivity and other related issues due to a lack of adequate sleep.  Now, five years after the release of the study, it seems that thousands of people are still having trouble sleeping.  Trouble sleeping can stem from a wide range of problems and can make for a restless night or lead to major sleep deprivation which can be quite serious.  Here are some of the common reasons why people are having trouble sleeping and what you need to know to deal with those problems (2).

Problem #1: Inability to Get Comfortable

Many people simply cannot fall asleep because they can never seem to get comfortable at night or they toss and turn a lot through the night.  This can be due to a poor bed, inappropriate pillows, or pain.

Solution:  If this seems to be your problem there are a couple of things that you can do to improve our quality of sleep.  First, if you cannot seem to get comfortable due to back or neck pain, this may be due to the type of pillow that you are using.  Try switching to something that gives you more support and a natural alignment during sleep such as a contoured memory foam pillow or adjusting the height and firmness of your pillows.  If your pain does not subside or there seems to be other pain that is causing you to have trouble sleeping it may be a sign of a more serious problem that you may want to speak to your health care provider about.

Problem # 2: Stress and Anxiety

Stress is one of the most common contributors to why people have trouble sleeping.  Stress causes a wide range of effects on your health from headaches to a lower immune system and many of the problems that result from stress can interfere with your sleep.

Solution: If you are having trouble sleeping due to stress or anxiety there are a few simple things that you can do.  Learning stress management and stress reduction techniques can help you to reduce the amount of stress in your life that is causing you to have trouble sleeping.  Meditating before bed can help you to unwind (1).  And using aromatherapy is a natural way to help you to relax and soothe you off to sleep (3).  Using bath oils or aromatic bath salts in a warm bath before bedtime, spraying your bed sheets with a lavender sleep mist, or using aromatherapy pillows are all great was to promote a relaxing night of sleep.

Problem # 3: Sleep Disorders

There are dozens of sleep disorders that can range from mild annoyances to serious, life-threatening conditions.  If you have trouble sleeping that is continuous and ongoing and that does not subside when you try any of the other remedies, then your trouble sleeping could be a sign of something more.

Solution: Speak to your doctor or a local sleep center who can test for sleep disorders.

Problem # 4: Hormonal Imbalances

Hormonal changes due to pregnancy, menopause or PMS can also give you trouble sleeping.

Solution: Speak with your doctor about ways to balance your hormones and to see which herbal remedies may be safe for you to try.  Also, any of the great aromatherapy choices mentioned above can also be helpful.

1. http://www.naturalnewsblogs.com/sleep-disorders-symptoms-causes-treatments/


2. http://www.naturalnewsblogs.com/3-benefits-getting-sleep/


3. http://www.naturalnewsblogs.com/best-aromatherapy-essential-oils/

Dr. Serge is a clinical nutritionist. He owns a doctorate degree in nutrition from McGill University in Canada. In addition, he completed a 7-year postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts where he studied the impact of fat as it relates to heart disease.

He has authored a book on this topic that is awaiting publication with Edition Berger publishers in Canada. He holds an advance certification in Nutrition Response Testing (SM) from Ulan Nutritional Systems in Florida and he is a certified herbalist through the Australian College of Phytotherapy.

His personalized nutritional programs allow to help individuals with a wide variety of health concerns such as hormonal imbalance, digestive issues, heart-related conditions, detoxes/cleanses, weight loss, fatigue, migraines, allergies, among others.

Common Reasons Why People Have Trouble Sleeping and What You Can Do to Get A Good Night’s Sleep

Tips For People Who Have Trouble Shutting Their Brain Off to Go to Sleep

Do you seem to be one of those people who lay awake in bed, tossing and turning trying to rest but you just have trouble shutting your brain off to sleep?  Here are some suggestions that may help you get rid of those distractions that keep you awake at night and help you learn to unwind, shutting your brain off to sleep when you need to (1, 2).

1. Do not tackle anything new at least one hour before bed.  When you open a new email, look at the bills, or start a new project just before you try to turn in you get your mind going and dwelling on whatever issue or project it is that you were dealing with.  This is especially problematic for creative people and those who seem to be naturally prone to worrying.   So instead, make sure that you finish all business of the day at least one hour before bedtime; leaving that hour for you to follow the next tip in creating a bedtime routine.

1. Establish a steady bedtime routine.  As young children, we know that a routine helps to train our brain that it is time to sleep, but as adults we seem to forget how useful this can be.  But by creating a regular routine for yourself, your body, and your brain, get into the habit of taking cues that it is time to sleep.  Good suggestions for creating your routine can be shutting down your computer, taking a bath, reading a short simple text, such as a magazine or collection of short essays, poems, or short stories.  Other ways to help you unwind and create a routine is to use that time before bed for various ways of pampering yourself; give yourself a manicure, use a massage pillow or soak your feet in a refreshing, vibrating foot bath to help you relax and shift your focus off of the day events so you do not have so much trouble shutting your brain off to sleep.

1.  Meditate.  Learning to meditate is a great way to focus your mind and relax your body. Meditating can help you in shutting your brain off to sleep as well and relieve the stress and tension of the day helping you to relax especially if you meditation with visualization techniques that can carry you away from all the hustle and bustle of the day.

1. Try aromatherapy.  Aromatherapy is another great way to help you calm your mind and get some sleep.  You can try candles, oil diffuser, aromatherapy pillows, or night time sprays that you can use to lightly mist your bed sheets with the great soothing scent of lavender and other essential oils blended to promote relaxation and help in shutting your brain off to sleep.

1. Get rid of the environmental noise that can distract you and keep you awake.  Having the television or radio on is often a distraction from sleeping and can not only keep you awake but remind you of the issues that are the reasons that you are having trouble shutting your brain off to sleep in the first place.  For noise that you can not eliminate, such as street noise, mask it with natural sounds of the ocean or similar types of soothing sounds that can help you sleep.

So, if you are having trouble shutting your brain off to sleep, try these great suggestions to help you get a better night’s sleep.

1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/08/bedtime-routine_n_5659183.html


2. http://www.nosleeplessnights.com/sleep-hygiene/bedtime-routine-for-adults/

Tips For People Who Have Trouble Shutting Their Brain Off to Go to Sleep

Underfunding of social care stores up trouble for the future | Letters

Your editorial (14 October) rightly points out that adult social care is underfunded but concludes that integration of the two services is the key to the problem. When I was a director of social services we never left people in hospital to save money if we had suitable provision, but we didn’t always have either enough staff or residential spaces available because, unlike the NHS, we were not allowed to overspend our budget. In the eight years since I retired, hundreds of millions of pounds have been taken out of those services at a time when our elderly population has increased by hundreds of thousands. It takes some delusion to conclude that this is a management problem. At my charity we hear every day about the harm caused by this underfunding: people dying in hospital from hypothermia and dehydration; people dying in care homes from pressure sores or being physically and mentally abused; people left alone and uncared for at home because they can no longer get home care.

This is not a perverse outcome of doctors and social workers not cooperating but the predictable outcome of government policy to cut services when demand was increasing. It is a national scandal and spending a fortune on a bureaucratic restructuring is not the answer.
John Beer
Chair, Action on Elder Abuse

• I am pleased to see your editorial resurrecting the idea that some variant on inheritance tax would be the fairest and most practical way to plug the funding gap for social care. After an exhaustive review, the last Labour government had reached that conclusion and was beginning to get the cross-party consensus to take it forward, only for Gordon Brown to back off in the face of David Cameron’s “death tax” taunts. A whole parliament was then wasted with Andrew Lansley’s dismantling of a framework that was ripe for the integration of health and social care, the distortion and then shelving of the Dilnot report, and George Osborne’s relentless protection of the family wealth of a privileged minority.

Each year more people are requiring health and social care in their old age. For the majority, that need coincides with declining personal income and, as the recent Care Quality Commission report indicates, a serious hollowing out of care services. Yet this booming older generation sits on unprecedented aggregate wealth. The current pay-as-you-go model for social care is putting increasing hardship on all but the most well off. A progressive levy on the wealth of pensioners (assessed before it is salted away in family trusts but collected after death) to put social care on the same basis as the NHS could remedy that and create the conditions for effective integration of health and social care. What better way for Theresa May to draw another line under the Cameron/Osborne era?
Colin Godber
Winchester

• The increase in care home closures is just one symptom of the care crisis in this country. Older and disabled people and their families report growing concerns about the availability and quality of home care services. The crisis in care is also having a profoundly damaging effect on the NHS.

Keeping older people out of hospital, well looked after in their own homes and communities, is key to a sustainable NHS. To deliver this requires integrated health and care. But integration won’t deliver better care for everyone unless we fund care properly and deliver it like health – free at the point of need and provided by a valued, well-trained and well-paid workforce.

Without urgent action by government, the care system is unsustainable and even more older and disabled people will be left without the support and care they need.
Stephen Burke
Director, United for All Ages and Good Care Guide

• You report the Care Quality Commission chief executive, David Behan, expressing concern about “the fragility of the social care market” after the publication of State of Care, the CQC’s annual report (Cuts to care of elderly take A&E to tipping point, says regulator, 13 October). With the obvious impact of social care cuts on the NHS he is right to argue for increased resourcing of care – but isn’t the real issue the fact that we have abandoned what was once a key element of our welfare state to what Behan terms “the market”?

When I started work in local authority social work as a teenager in the late 1960s the vast majority of care given to the elderly was provided by the public sector, with almost every community having their own council care home, often linked to sheltered housing schemes. Home care was provided by the local authority’s home help service and, in my experience, staff received reasonable pay and proper training.

The marketisation of social care began under Margaret Thatcher with significantly reduced resourcing to local authorities and then funding changes to community care that penalised public providers and incentivised the use of the private sector. The huge increase in private care homes from the 1980s onwards was accompanied by the gradual closure of local authority Part III accommodation, and domiciliary care companies took over the work of the home help service. The end result is fragmented, uncoordinated provision of varying quality, often provided by poorly-trained, low-paid staff.

It is a disgrace that we leave the care of some of our most vulnerable citizens to the whims of the market. Increased resources alone are not the answer. The scale of the issues facing social care requires a complete abandonment of this flawed market approach and the renationalisation of our care system, with the central role in service provision returned to local authorities. Alongside a long-overdue formal merging of health and social care – called for by the health select committee on several occasions – such radical changes are the only answer to the issues addressed by the CQC.

Labour’s proposals to renationalise the rail network are clearly popular. A similar proposal to renationalise care could be an even greater vote-winner, particularly among the older age group more likely to vote.
David Hinchliffe
Former Labour MP and past chair of Commons health committee

• The Care Quality Commission is not the only organisation with worries about inadequate adult social care funding and the impact on already clogged-up hospitals. In Surrey the extra £24m the county council needs to spend on rising demand is stretching finances to the limit.

The county’s latest population growth data suggests rising numbers of over-65s in the next two decades will add a further £59m to the authority’s bill for care for the elderly and disabled.

‘The rising number of over-65s in the next two decades will add a further £59m to Surrey council’s bill for care for the elderly and disabled,’ writes Mel Few. Photograph: Alamy

While the 2% council tax precept introduced nationally earlier this year was a welcome move, it falls many millions of pounds short of what is needed now – let alone in two decades.

Should the government contemplate using the precept to cover the gap, it would need to think about whether it is content to allow Surrey taxpayers to carry so large a burden for local services when they pay more income tax to the national exchequer than any other region outside London.
Mel Few
Cabinet member for adult social care, Surrey County Council

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

Underfunding of social care stores up trouble for the future | Letters

The NHS is in trouble. Jeremy Hunt can’t afford this junior doctors’ strike | Polly Toynbee

The knives are out for the junior doctors as they threaten five-day strikes, starting on 12 September. They can expect both barrels from the Tory press: “How dare the doctors barter lives for cash” asks the Mail. “It will be only a matter of time before the body-count begins.”

The BMA says it will call off the strikes if the government abandons imposing a tougher new contract in October, but the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was in a no-turning-back mood on the BBC’s Today programme this morning. The junior doctors’ leader, Ellen McCourt, says appeals to re-open talks have met a “deafening silence”.

Let’s remember where all this began – and it wasn’t with the junior doctors, ploughing on night and day through ever-worsening conditions in the NHS.

This is another of David Cameron’s disastrous legacies. Looking for bright ideas for his 2015 manifesto, he plucked “a seven-day NHS” out of thin air. He used a set of figures purporting to show high weekend death-rates that have since been resoundingly rubbished by health statisticians. Senior figures in the health department warned that squeezing yet more work out of an already stretched NHS was unrealistic and unwise. It was an election slogan, not a worked-out policy.

And why now, of all times? The NHS has never seen such a deep financial crisis, receiving an average 0.8% funding increase over the years since 2010, compared with an average 4% uplift since 1948. The department of health press office dutifully puts out near-mendacious factoids, such as “funding is at record levels, with the highest number of doctors employed in the history of the NHS.” But with the population rising, and especially soaring numbers of elderly people and people with diabetes, Britain still has many fewer doctors, nurses and beds per head of the population, and less money to spend than comparable countries.

What started as a stunt has turned into a confrontation from which the government now feels it cannot retreat

As the DoH knows well, the shortage of doctors and nurses leaves many rotas unfilled, putting extra pressure on staff, especially in A&E. The risk is doctors will flee abroad and to Scotland, while the Brexit vote could mean EU doctors and nurses decide to go home. Is this the time to provoke the precious doctors we have?

Let’s remember who these “juniors” are. They are not rebellious reckless youth, but 50,000 of the cleverest and most hardworking adults of their generation; the cream of their school science classes, serious-minded grown-ups in their 20s and 30s. Doctors are not known for political radicalism, either, so the health department’s statement that they are “playing politics” is well off the mark. They are angry, very angry, that the most dedicated workhorses of the NHS have been picked on at random to have their weekend pay and working conditions worsened. Why? It isn’t even going to save money for the NHS.

What started as an electioneering stunt has turned into a full-on confrontation from which the government now feels it cannot retreat. Theresa May had a long talk with Hunt before reappointing him, arguing for the need to see off these strikers as a matter of her authority. That was a bad mistake. What she needed was a fresh, open mind, someone whose pride was not at stake.

The BMA did all it could: the previous junior doctors’ leader, Johann Malawana, reluctantly agreed a deal which he told his members was the best he thought he could get, and he tried hard to sell it to them. But 58% rejected it in a ballot, he had to stand down and McCourt has taken over. When I interviewed her in April, she was just about to begin her 13-hour Saturday shift in a North Yorkshire hospital, to be followed by 13 hours on Sunday. The new contract will make her work every other weekend and cut her pay. She said “I love what I do in emergency, the variety of cases, working with the sickest patients when you can help them most.” So how did the government manage to provoke such people to this?

On this issue, as with Brexit, May has stamped her political identity. Retreat is unlikely. In a lifetime of covering hundreds of strikes, in my view they rarely begin for good reasons or end well, especially for strikers, however justified. The public has staunchly backed the junior doctors so far, and maybe still will support this most trusted of professions, with the NHS near the top of public concerns. But since many people die every day in hospital, you can bet the rightwing press will find a good case or two where they can claim, however spuriously, that it was the strikers’ fault. That’s the risk the doctors take.

But the risk May and Hunt take is greater. The NHS is paralysed with debt, as hospitals put out bogus plans pretending they will balance their books. The public is rumbling that major re-organisations are planned locally without anyone telling them, under the 44 new STPs, local sustainability and transformation plans. Persuading people that often good plans for joining up health and social care and reconfiguring local services, are not just cuts – when they are happening at a time, in effect, of cuts – would be a Herculean task for a trusted health secretary, but how is Hunt to do that?

These noisy strikes will add to local objections to any changes on the ground. Forcing doctors into this new contract is virtually irrelevant to the current state of the NHS.

The public think they were promised £350m a week more for the NHS as a Brexit bonus, but instead will come to hear of unpopular amalgamations of some A&Es and maternity units. Anyone sensible looking at the current state of the NHS and the problems it faces, would clear the decks of all extraneous trouble – and settling with the doctors would come first.

The NHS is in trouble. Jeremy Hunt can’t afford this junior doctors’ strike | Polly Toynbee