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FeedTo Sleep, Perchance to Dream
Insomniacs, rejoice. You may simply need to change your habits. For those with more severe sleep issues, there is hope.
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Most people can describe insomnia, but few understand the biochemical components of the most problematic sleep disorder. Yet there’s good news for those who cannot get a good night’s rest: Science continuously reveals new insights.
“There are things out all of the time, like how to get better sleep and how to feel better,” says Dr. John Townsend, a neurologist with the Sleep Disorder Center at Christiana Care. “The key to feel a whole lot better is to recognize the problem and fix it.”
Though the symptom-diagnosis dynamic guided the school of sleep science through its early years, a new drive among researchers has pushed the limits. They want to find out how to tackle not just one trait of troubled sleep, but how to treat the problem at the broadest level.
Insomnia comes in many forms, most of which are related to behavior or chemicals, such as medication, stress or jet lag. The best way to determine an effective treatment is to figure out what triggered the disruption.
When someone is asleep, they are in one of two stages—REM sleep (rapid eye movement) or non-REM sleep. The two states are as different as awake and asleep, says Dr. Lisa Shives of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
“REM sleep has features that are more similar to awake than non-REM, like active dreams and increased heart and breathing rates,” she says. “People are always intrigued by REM, and there has been a great deal of research in the past year as far as REM and memory, specifically the slippage between awake and REM sleep. People typically move from one to the other on a regular basis as they lie in bed, but rarely remember the transition when they wake.”
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