The Importance of Good Sleep and How Occupational Therapy Can Help
Have you been having trouble sleeping lately? Maybe you wake up frequently throughout the night, or perhaps you have difficulty falling asleep in the first place. Following these issues, you may be tired throughout your day and find it difficult to get through your daily tasks. At this point, you may tend to lean on a little caffeine or sugar to get through the day. However, there are healthier habits that can lead to better sleep! Without these habits, poor sleep can take a toll on your health in multiple ways. Let’s discuss how sleep can affect your overall health, and how it can be fixed with the help of an occupational therapist.
What Does Good Sleep Look Like?
You may have heard that 8 hours is the recommended amount of sleep for everyone. Current health guidelines provide a range of hours that a person may need depending on their age. Children below the age of 12 may require upwards of 9 hours of sleep per day, especially the younger they are. Teens aged 13 to 18 years old require 8 to 10 hours of sleep. Adults between the ages of 19 and 64 require 7 to 9 hours of sleep, and those aged 65 and above require 7 to 8. These numbers can vary person to person, but general guidelines suggest these are appropriate hours of sleep.
Let’s briefly breakdown what a sleep cycle is why the different stages of sleep are important. A sleep cycle typically lasts around 90 minutes, and ideally a person experiences 4 to 6 sleep cycles per 24 hours. Within a sleep cycle are 4 stages, which are:
- NREM 1 (Light sleep)
- NREM 2 (Deeper sleep)
- NREM 3 (Deep sleep)
- REM
NREM 1, also known as deep sleep, is the shortest stage. In this stage, your brain slows down and becomes less active. This is where you may begin to doze off. In NREM 2, the body begins to shut down as muscles relax and heart rate decreases. Your brain will also shut off it senses so sleep is not interrupted. NREM 3, known as deep sleep, is where the body repairs itself. In deep sleep, your immune system, tissues, and other parts of the body work to grow and strengthen to keep you healthy. The older a person gets, the less time they spend in this stage and spend more in stage two. Lastly, REM is the stage where we dream. Your brain is fully active, but your muscles are temporarily paralyzed (except for the ones required to breathe). As you move from one sleep cycle to the next, this stage gets longer.
Why Is Good Sleep Important?
As you can see, getting good sleep involves a lot of activity in the body. While we tend to think that sleep means shutting everything off, just the opposite occurs. Sleep is the body’s best time to heal and grow. Each stage is crucial to helping the body remain healthy. The less sleep, we get, the less time we spend in these stages that allow our body to maintain itself. So, what happens when you don’t get good sleep?
Because sleep is important for boosting and maintaining the health of you brain, heart, immune system, metabolism, and mood, you can see how easily a consistent lack of sleep can lead to more severe health effects. These include an increased risk of high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, cognitive deficits, and depression. A lack of sleep can lead to a vast array of negative consequences on your body. Taking steps to improve your sleep habits can prevent these things from occurring.
Occupational Therapy’s Role in Sleep
The role of an occupational therapist is to help people return to doing the things that are important to them in their daily lives. Sleep is important to everyone, so naturally, OT’s have the ability to help someone improve their sleep! What can your OT help you do? OT’s are trained to view their patients in a holistic manner, which allows them to gain the full picture of a person and identify the areas they need to step in. These areas can include:
- Identifying underlying issues: Perhaps you feel physical pain that is keeping you awake. OT’s can treat it! Or, you may be feeling emotional or mental pain such as anxiety and depression. OT’s can treat it!
- Building a routine: An OT can help you carve out a routine that involves activities that are meaningful to you. Part of this routine involves setting a regular bed time, as well as activities that encourage lowering your brain activity before you go to bed, allowing for efficient sleep!
- Finding the right exercise: OT’s encourage client-centered care, meaning everything they do is tailored specifically for the person they are working with. Your OT can identify the right exercises for you that encourage better sleep habits. Participating in good exercises leads to better sleep, and better sleep leads to more energy the next day for exercise. It’s a healthy cycle!
- Environmental modification: Adjusting things such as noise, lighting, bedding, and other aspects of one’s environment can lead to better sleep, and your OT can help identify what needs to change to create the best environment for you.
- Mindfulness: OT’s can provide education and training on the benefits of mindfulness exercises, such as meditation, yoga, and deep breathing to help calm the body and prepare for a good night’s rest.
These are just a few ways in which OT’s can assist in creating healthy sleep habits and routines, leading to better overall health. If you are currently experiencing health concerns that have worsened due to poor sleep, your OT may also be able to help treat the symptoms that come along with them, such as pain and weakness, along with facilitating better sleep for you.
If you feel that you are experiencing poor sleep each night, or you are experiencing poor health conditions as a side effect of dysfunctional sleep, contact us at ProTailored Physical Therapy! We will work with you to provide a specifically tailored plan just for you that allows you to return to better health and better sleep!