actually doing everything you can do to get a good night’s sleep. Most of this is straightforward and just common sense, and most of these tips – and there are lots more - are freely available from any web site dedicated to healthy living or to sleep problems.
.....(By the way, I often get asked where to surf for health information, and I always direct people to two sites to start with: www.nih.gov, and www.mayoclinic.com. These are not the best sites for everything you will want to know, but they are excellent sites to start out at).
.....Thus, you shouldn’t drink coffee or other stimulating caffeine-containing drinks before bedtime (duhh!). You should reserve the bedroom only for doing those things one should do in a bedroom only, namely paying bills and watching TV. Just kidding. The real answer is: sleeping and having sex, or more often the other way around (except, of course, for some guys I know who do both simultaneously).
.....You should also not eat heavy meals for several hours before bed-time, you should avoid late-day doses of stimulant medications, you should make sure the bedroom temperature is just right for you (easier said than done, of course, since my wife, for example, enjoys the kind of bedroom ambience that’s ordinarily found in Antarctica – outdoors in winter, while I prefer a more balmy bedroom temperature, roughly the one you find at midday in central Africa during summer) and so on.
.....Exercise is an odd factor relative to sleep. For some people, exercise before bed acts a stimulant, while in others, exercising at night leads to relaxation and hence better sleep. Overall, though, a regular exercise program is a terrific aid to sleeping regularly and feeling less tense.
.....Anyway, as I said earlier, this is all mostly common sense.
.....If all those changes don’t work, the next step is to get your sleep abnormality diagnosed properly. “But, but, but,” you may sputter, “any idiot can diagnose a sleep problem. You can’t sleep, that’s the problem. Period.”
Actually, no, it isn’t because abnormal sleep can stem from many causes, and the consequent sleep abnormality is best alleviated by appropriate treatment of the underlying condition. Thus, for example, metabolic disorders such as hyperthyroidism can cause a change in sleep patterns, as can chronic and acute pain conditions, menopause, depression, and many other conditions.
In fact, I remember a study once that found that the bulk of aging men referred to a particular sleep clinic for sleep abnormalities were sent home with a diagnosis of – you guessed it, ladies – an enlarged prostate. Most of these guys, you see, who’d been waking up 4 or 5 times a night because of what they thought was a sleep abnormality were really suffering from a pee abnormality.
.....So, a proper diagnosis is important, especially since there are many readily available over-the-counter prepa-
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