Treatment for Sleeping Disorders
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009To say that sleeping disorders - these being conditions that interfere with sleeping patterns - can be distressing to the sufferers and people around them would probably be an understatement, especially after seeing the emotional, psychological and physical difficulties such sleeping disorders cause. It is for this reason, then, that the search for ways of dealing with sleeping disorders (which tend to be chronic) is almost an endemic one, with literary thousands of articles, books and other resources aimed at helping people with sleeping disorders having been developed, as a result of the numerous studies on the subject that have been carried out.
Incidentally, when we talk of sleeping disorders, we must not limit our perspective to the ‘inability to fall asleep’ or insomnia, which is what tends to come to mind for most of us when we hear of the term ’sleeping disorder.’ In actual fact, there is a great variety of other sleeping disorders besides the inability to fall asleep, including those where a person is able to fall asleep, but has difficulties waking up in the morning, or those where one has problems following socially acceptable sleeping patterns; like the cases where one finds that they can only sleep during the daytime and not at night.
Devising a treatment program for sleeping disorders starts with a diagnosis of the problem - where the sleeping disorder one happens to be suffering from is identified and what could be causing it also identified; before best way to confront the problem can be worked out. Typical approaches to sleeping difficulty treatment include psychotherapy, rehabilitation (which is essentially change of habits) and the use of medication for some cases.
Rehabilitation is used in the treatment of sleeping disorders whose root can be traced to faulty long term sleeping habits - like where a person develops the habits of sleeping at socially unacceptable times during their youth, only for that habit to turn into a liability in their adulthood. Here, the sleeping disorder does not have any major biochemical root, and all that is required is essentially to reset the patient’s biological clock by focused change of habits, and thereby restore healthy sleeping habits.
Psychotherapeutic treatments sleeping disorders, on the other hand, get their efficacy from the fact that many sleeping disorders occur due to psychological illnesses such as depression (which typically manifests as either too much sleep or inability falling asleep), and which is best treated through psychotherapy as a first line of treatment, before resorting to medication if psychotherapy proves inadequate.
Turning to medication-based treatments for sleeping disorders, these are typically the only viable route to sustainable treatment for sleeping disorders that are deeply rooted in biochemical deficiencies, which simply can’t be adequately addressed by the psychotherapeutic or rehabilitative treatments.