Sleep is a top priority for MS
If someone were to ask me what is the first thing a person with MS should do, I would say make sure you sleep. If you don’t do anything else on your own every day, you should at least make sure you get seven to nine hours of adequate and deep sleep.
What is good sleep? Being able to fall asleep and stay asleep. Easier said than done for a person with MS, whose sleep becomes dysfunctional due to bladder problems, pain, spasticity, worries about life problems, and the actual effect of MS on the brain.
Why is so important to sleep?
Sleep affects EVERYTHING in the body: the heart, energy level, pain, weight, and even the skin. Your brain cannot function well without it. It affects your mental state: judgment, reaction times, moods, memory, concentration and decision making. Sleep allows your brain to process information and store it in memory; It rejuvenates parts of your brain that were used during the day and even parts that are not used normally.
Sleeps keep your immune system and resistance healthy to prevent colds, viruses and illnesses. Sleep problems can lead to accidents, as the balance and coordination problems suffered by many people with MS get worse. Lack of sleep makes it harder to deal with stress, solve problems, or recover from illness or injury.
Good sleep relaxes the body, which helps reduce the pain of sore and tight muscles.
Lack of sleep or lack of sleep can affect your life at home and work, as well as your relationships. Energy levels, which are already plagued by the fatigue factor, drop exponentially for a person living with MS.
It is common sense. But what is not obvious to many people is that sleep also gives your vision a break. Vision is a cognitive activity! Poor sleep means your neurotransmitters, which normally suppress pain, don’t have time to cool off. Not getting enough sleep can affect the arteries, increasing the risk of heart disease / stroke and causing the skin to stretch and become shallow.
Sleeping less affects your appetite by causing you to eat more, increasing your risk of weight gain. Being overweight makes physical activity difficult and reduces stamina, which means fewer calories are burned. Also, inadequate sleep releases less serotonin in the brain which can make the body crave sugary foods.
There are several things you can do to improve the quality of your sleep. (Note: this list was from an article in Make the connection, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs)
- Keep your bedroom quiet, dark and cool
- Make your bedroom a place for sleeping only and not a place for other activities like watching TV, reading, working on the computer, or listening to the radio.
- Create a relaxing bedtime routine
- Stick to a sleep schedule, making sure to wake up at around the same time every day.
- Get out and exercise every day (but not close to bedtime)
- Take medications that can delay or interrupt your sleep earlier in the day.
- Avoid caffeine and nicotine.
- Avoid alcohol before going to bed or drinking excessive amounts of alcohol
- Avoid large meals and drinks late at night.
For people with MS whose sleep is affected by their symptoms, I offer these suggestions:
- Manage symptoms that affect your sleep by minimizing them as much as possible. For example, I suffer from spasticity and make sure to stretch my muscles. everybody day. This reduces the tightness, jerking, and pain caused by spasticity. I abstain from liquids two hours before going to bed so that my bladder is as empty as possible. Since a side effect of the antidepressant I take causes drowsiness, I take it at night. If I wake up in the middle of the night worrying about something, I read a magazine article to think of something else.
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Consider prescribing sleeping pills. Personally, I have had a ‘script for them for thirty years. My personal rule is that if I have two nights of bad sleep in a row, I take a pill the third night. I do sleep, because I think that not sleeping well is much more harmful to me than a sleeping pill.
So, in short, make sleep a priority. A requirement. You will feel better, think better, and function better.
