Insomnia & Hypersomnia
Insomnia and hypersomnia are two conditions that sit on opposite ends of the sleep disorder spectrum. Both can impact a person’s overall well-being but in different ways.
Insomnia
Insomnia is one of the most well-known sleep disorders that centers on struggling to fall asleep, being unable to stay asleep, or a combination of the two issues. Poor sleep quality is usually the result.
During a Bipolar Manic phase, I regularly encounter bouts of insomnia. I have gone from a single night to going through 5 nights straight without any sleep. This has become, not natural, but an experience I can manage now as it’s happened that many times. I know that I shouldn’t lay in bed and attempt to force myself to sleep and expect it to happen. I just toss and turn and get frustrated by it, it’s not happening. I know that my appetite is effected when I’m experiencing insomnia, so I don’t cook or prepare full meals, I just snack and eat nibbles, I make sure I drink plenty of water too as I’ve found I sweat more than normal when I’m not sleeping (that could just be me? Anyone else concur with this?). I don’t have any fatigue or tiredness at all during the day following a night of no sleep. I just have sensory distortion issues after about 3 days of not sleeping and I feel like I’m being touched or tactile hallucinations and sometimes auditory hallucinations too. I’m just used to these now though so I accept them as the norm.
Insomnia can be further categorised as either acute or chronic.
Acute insomnia is typically short-term and caused by external factors such as stress, traumatic events, work, and even personal relationships.
Meanwhile, chronic insomnia is classified by sleep difficulties that last longer than a month. Typically, this type of insomnia is a byproduct of underlying health factors, and also by taking certain medications, indulging in substance abuse can also be a contributing factor.
Common symptoms include:
* sleeping for short periods
* lying awake for extended periods before falling asleep
* waking up too early
* frequently feeling as if you haven’t slept
* staying awake for most of the night
Hypersomnia
While insomnia is the inability to fall asleep, hypersomnia is characterised as excessive sleeping. Hypersomnia is a pathological state characterised by a lack of alertness during the waking episodes of the day. It is not to be confused with fatigue, which is a normal physiological state. Daytime sleeping appears most commonly during situations where little interaction is needed.
Since hypersomnia impairs people's attention levels, or their wakefulness, their quality of life may be impacted as well. This is especially true for people whose jobs request high levels of attention, such as in the healthcare field.
People with hypersomnia may feel like they need to sleep more because the rest they receive isn’t recuperative. More importantly, those naps may come at odd or inappropriate times such as while at work, when eating, or even in social settings. These individuals may get more than 11 hours of sleep a day, yet still, feel tired.
I’ve been sleeping 30+ hours on 3 occasions within the last 6 weeks, and had at least 7/8 sleeps that have lasted 20+ hours in this period too. I have felt absolutely dreadful when I’ve woken up from these bouts of sleep, and felt as though I’d been sleeping in a washing machine or something. I didn’t feel refreshed or revitalised at all. The sleep seems to go from deep sleep, where there’s no dreaming or alertness to your alarm or phone ringing etc, to a short dreaming phase to a light dozing period where you feel like you’re going to wake up yet you don’t and you fall back into the cycle of these three states again. This is solely just my own experience and explanation of how it feels so far, it might not be the complete description of what I’ve been doing, and that may come next time, and I am surmising the deep sleep state from the fact I have not been woken by any alarm I have set or phone calls I have missed, when normally these things wake me up.
Unlike insomnia, hypersomnia is a chronic condition, and it can impact mood and cognition.
Common symptoms include
* irritability
* anxiety
* persistent drowsiness or tiredness
* poor appetite
* low energy
* difficulty with thinking or speaking
* trouble remembering
* restlessness
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