Sleep and Pain: How Pain Affects Sleep?

Why Does Pain Affect Sleep and What Can I Change? The chronic pain leads to sleep deprivation whereas, improper sleep leads to make the pain symptoms worsen. We don’t always take care of our health, although there are several simple tricks which we can do to make ourselves internally healthy like having a proper nutritious diet or consuming supplements like Prescript assist, which further promotes the gut health and boost up the immune system by providing us enough energy to cope with the problems.

Pain is actually the sleep thief. The acute or chronic pain can cause insomnia or poor sleep quality. Pain is always bearable during the day time, but it becomes your biggest enemy at night. And on the contrary, restlessness or lack of sleep and tiredness kills your enthusiasm and makes you more pain sensitive leading to the further decrease in health.

There is a sleep cycle, containing number of stages from which we cycle through:

• Stages 1 and 2 are the starting one with lighter stages of sleep.
• Then comes the stages 3 and 4, which are the deeper one and they are called as slow wave sleep.
• Then we move back to the lighter sleep, and then into the REM (rapid eye movement). It is where we dream.
• The cycle gets repeated several times during the night. In the beginning, more time is spent in deep sleep, while in morning, the time is spent more in lighter stages and dreaming.

After most of the REM stages, we usually wake-up. It is very much normal to wake up several times at night. Most people don’t even realize the fact that they woke up during the night, they just roll over and go back to sleep again. But, when we are in pain, we can wake and notice that pain without easily going back to sleep. The nervous system has to be calm for a proper sleep. But during the pain, there is an increased activity in our nervous system that needs to be calm down all over again so that we can go back to sleep.

Pain during the REM phase:

• Some people have reported about pain during their dreams, but this isn’t real pain and disappears when they wake up. There is another possibility of the real bodily pain which a person feels when he is awake but this pain is also incorporated into his dreams. During REM, the skeletal muscles are paralyzed, and so when the brain is in REM sleep, vivid narrative dreams occur. The paralysis in REM may contribute to the bodily pain and make it worse than the non REM phase when the body can easily move around.
• Some psychologists did a test in which they induced a mild pain in the REM stage of sleep. When the subjects woke up, they reported of seeing that about 30% of dream included pain in the same part of body where the researchers applied some pressure. The level of pain was higher in the dream as compared to the amount when the person was awake.

Hyperalgesia means increased sensitivity to pain. It is a result of loss of sleep, especially loss of REM sleep. It contradicts the drugs, which are used to treat severe pain but they suppress the REM sleep and may make the patient more sensitive to the pain he feels. Antidepressant drugs also do the same, they suppress the REM sleep and so make us complain more about the pain. So poor sleep quality leads to more severe pain and increased fatigue.

How to improve the sleep in pain?

• Set a proper routine. Get up at the same time every morning, no matter what time you did sleep at night. Go to bed at the same time again. Before bed, spend at least half an hour doing the same things in the same order every night. This helps the body to prepare for the sleep. The last thing that you do in the routine should be quiet and relaxing.
• Go to bed when only you are sleepy. The energy levels go in waves during the day. So you should go to bed when energy level is down. Look for the signs of sleepiness.
• Make a good association between the bed and the sleep. Don’t use bed for other purposes like reading books, or watching TV. If a lot of time have passed and you didn’t fall asleep, then don’t lay in the bed and do some activity until you feel sleepy.
• Stop worrying if you can’t sleep. Stress or worry leads to more disturbance in the nervous system, making it to panic. The thing that increases your anxiety is watching the clock ticking and time running. So just remove the clock from the room or turn it around so that you can’t see the time.

Author Bio: This guest post was written by Hassan Khan Yousafzai, he is passionate about Digital marketing. Along with educational background in Software Engineering he is bridging gap between marketing and development department. At Techvando, he has been consulting brands all over Pakistan.