Hypersomnia means excessive sleepiness or excessive daytime sleepiness. There are multiple reasons you could have it, the most common being inadequate or poor quality sleep at night. A few factors that affect sleep at night are stressful nature of work, family demands, exam stress, pressures of social life, or underlying health problems like sleep disorders, medication, or medical and psychiatric disorders.
Hypersomnia will be helped or cured with some adjustments to lifestyle habits. Seek advice from your doctor or upset clinic if you continue to feel excessively sleepy. Let’s know more about this disorder!
Characteristics of hypersomnia
The characteristics of hypersomnia vary from one person to the next, depending on their age, lifestyle, and any underlying causes. Under the International Classification of Sleep Disorders, daytime sleepiness is defined as ‘the inability to remain awake and alert during the needed waking times of the day, leading to unintended lapses into drowsiness or sleep’.
In extreme cases, an individual with hypersomnia might sleep soundly in the dead of night for 12 hours or more, but still, feel the requirement to nap during the day. Sleeping and napping might not help, and also the mind may remain foggy with drowsiness. An individual with hypersomnia may have very disturbed sleep but not remember anything of it.
What are the categories of hypersomnia?
Hypersomnia may be primary or secondary. Primary hypersomnia occurs with no other medical conditions present. The sole symptom is excessive fatigue.
On the other hand, secondary hypersomnia is because of medical conditions. These can include apnea, Parkinson’s disease, kidney disease, and chronic fatigue syndrome. These conditions cause poor sleep at nighttime, leading you to feel tired during the day.
What causes hypersomnia?
Primary hypersomnia is believed to be caused by problems within the brain systems that control sleep and waking functions. Secondary hypersomnia is the result of external conditions that cause affect sleep and result in fatigue. For instance, apnea can cause hypersomnia because it can cause trouble breathing in the hours of the night, forcing people to awaken multiple times throughout the night.
Some medications can even cause hypersomnia. Frequent drug and alcohol use may trigger sleepiness during the day. Other possible causes are low thyroid function and head injury.
Who is in danger of hypersomnia?
People with conditions that make them tired during the day are most in danger of hypersomnia. These conditions include apnea, kidney conditions, heart conditions, brain conditions, atypical depression, and low thyroid function. People who smoke or drink regularly are in danger of developing hypersomnia. Medications that cause drowsiness can have side effects just like hypersomnia.
Symptoms of hypersomnia
Depending on the cause, the symptoms of hypersomnia may include:
- Feeling unusually tired all the time
- The need for daytime naps
- Feeling drowsy, despite sleeping and napping- not refreshed on waking up
- Difficulty thinking and making decisions- the mind feels ‘foggy’
- Apathy
- Memory or concentration difficulties
- An increased risk of accidents, especially motorcar accidents.
Diagnosing hypersomnia
If you consistently feel drowsy during the day, discuss with your doctor. In making a diagnosis of hypersomnia, your doctor will ask you about your sleeping habits, what quantity of sleep you get in the dark, if you get up at the hours of darkness, and whether you go to sleep during the day. Your doctor will want to grasp if you’re having any emotional problems or are taking any drugs which will be interfering together with your sleep.
Treatment of hypersomnia
If you’re diagnosed with hypersomnia, your doctor can prescribe various drugs to treat it, including stimulants, antidepressants, also as several newer medications.
If you’re diagnosed with a sleep disorder, your doctor may prescribe a treatment called continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP. With CPAP, you wear a mask over your nose while you’re sleeping. A machine that delivers a non stop flow of air into the nostrils is attached to the mask. The pressure of the air that is being continuously fed into the nostrils helps keep the airways open.
If you’re taking a medicine that causes drowsiness, ask your doctor about changing to one that’s less likely to make you sleepy. You will also want to go to bed earlier to try to get more sleep in the dark and eliminate alcohol and caffeine from your daily habits.
Healthy sleeping habits to try at home
We’re under no circumstances saying that each one of those problems doesn’t matter and you must just let it all go. What we are saying though, is that by being more conscious of the stresses the day brings, you’ll be able to be better prepared and feel more up to the mark over why you’re feeling tired and overwhelmed. Unfortunately, fatigue only brings with it more stress – it’s a vicious circle and stress becomes a habit that’s hard to break. Stress causes sleeplessness and makes you drowsy.
Here are some sleep tips to manage your sleep at home, even if you seek to go to a doctor at some point:
●Carry a notebook during the day where you’ll be able to make notes of to-do’s and keep track of your sleep or drowsiness. Feeling confident that you just are less likely to forget or duplicate something can ease off a great amount of vacation stress and facilitate you to follow the day. This is known as maintaining a sleep diary.
●Be smart about food and drink. Before you decide to binge, stop and think how your choices will affect you later in the day when it’s time to sleep. Try to avoid anything containing alcohol, caffeine, or nicotine in the evening.
●Overall, make sure you maintain good sleep habits, like getting the recommended eight hours of sleep at night and monitoring your sleep environment- the room temperature, mattress, pillows, comforters, the level of darkness, etc.
What about your bed?
We already know about how your bed mattress affects your sleep. If you have delayed replacing a worn-out one, this is the right time to get a new mattress. Livpure is not only offering a huge range of mattresses for you to choose from suited to your specific needs, check out for the amazing discounts as well. And when you are already getting a mattress, why not change the whole setup with our bundle offers?
The All-weather Comforter is luxurious, comes in exciting colors and various sizes as well- you can use it in air conditioning as well! Along with all these, discover a wide range of pillows for your sleep. Not only that, to cut out work from home stress, we have sitting solutions for you as well- a back support pillow and neck pillow. When you have a good sleeping environment, you would want to get into bed timely as well, and get some snooze!
Conclusion
Daytime sleepiness is not a major problem- it can be eliminated from your life by doing some lifestyle changes and if it’s serious, with the help of a doctor. Do not overlook the symptoms as delaying treatment can cause long-term health risks. Your body needs sleep to replenish, and you should invest time for your own health before anything else!