How Is Your Sleep? • Jessica Cho
How Is Your Sleep? By Dr. Jessica Cho, MD
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as anyone asked you recently, how is your sleep? The pandemic has led us to pay closer attention to our sleep, whether our sleep has improved or become worse, and how it affects our day to day life. Sleep Health is a combination of a healthy routine creating regular habits for our sleep in addition to addressing Sleep Disorders. It’s exactly like our overall health, by creating healthy habits around diet and exercise but also addressing our underlying medical problems. Sleep Health is much more than just that one night of sleep. With the pandemic, we’re now spending all of our time in bed. We’re working, studying, eating, watching Netflix, and catching up with our friends on Zoom. But it’s not just Gen-Z or Millennials facing disrupted sleep. Many Baby Boomers and Health Care Professionals’ quality of sleep has been poor. Ideally, our bed should only be used for sleep and sex since our brain is good at making associations. Now, this might sound counterintuitive, but if it’s taking longer than 15 minutes to fall asleep, then you should get out of bed until you’re feeling sleepy again and then get back to bed. Avoiding TV in bed and mobile devices at night to get better rest and higher quality sleep.
Well known among sleep professionals is that chronic insomnia that lasts longer than 3 months is best addressed first by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) and not by medication. But, it is unfortunately less known to the public and even other non-sleep doctors. It’s much more than just sleep hygiene. It’s to take a look and assess our sleep with a sleep journal, figure out how much sleep our body needs, and only spend that time in bed all while creating healthy habits and attitudes about sleep. I also want to preface that insomnia might be related to other sleep disorders such as Obstructive Sleep Apnea which often presents itself as insomnia in women. So, it’s very important to be assessed by sleep doctors first. For those of us who want to optimize our sleep before it gets bad, I do have some recommendations. Talk to your doctor if you have symptoms of insomnia have been lasting longer than 3 months.
INFORMED Facts
20 I|I How Is Your Sleep?
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According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the word “Circadian” is a compound of the two latin words “circa” meaning “about” and “dies” meaning “day”. The word “Circadian” first appeared in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary during the 1960’s.*
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