Do you ever get to the end of your day so exhausted that you just can’t wait to drop into bed? You drag yourself through the last few hours of the evening knowing that you’re so tired you’ve definitely got a good night’s sleep ahead of you. Then just as you crawl under the sheets, your mind takes off… you remember everything that didn’t get done today and everything that will need to get done tomorrow, you try to remember if you started the dishwasher before you got into bed, and you can’t stop replaying the disagreement with your husband over and over in your mind. Your body is screaming for sleep, but as soon as you drop into bed your brain is going full speed ahead.
What happened? Most people with chronic health issues struggle at some point with sleep problems. The reasons can vary from person to person (of course discuss this with your doctor), but often it comes from stress. Having chronic health issues is stressful both physically and emotionally. Any kind of health challenge is a stress on the body and the body will naturally produce stress chemicals. Plus there’s the emotional stress – fear of what’s going to happen in the future, guilt about not being able to keep up your old activities, insecurity in relationships, plus all the work to keep up with medications, therapies, and appointments. And your body has to work harder just to keep up with the day to day duties of keeping you going. It’s just the nature of having a chronic illness. Actually in many ways, it’s pretty much the nature of living in our current culture. Life is going at ever increasing speeds and it’s hard for even typical people to keep up, much less those of us with health challenges. Our brains are trying so hard to keep up with the go, go, go lifestyle and are having trouble shutting down on cue when we try to sleep.
Part of the problem is that our brains are still pretty much identical to the brains of those who lived thousands of years ago. Back then, survival meant that when approached by a threat (picture a lion or bear), the brain was able to instantly assess the threat and release chemicals to help the primitive man run or protect himself. This has been referred to as the “fight or flight” response. These chemicals reroute as much energy and resources as possible towards survival. So that means your muscles are poised for action, your lungs are ready to process oxygen more efficiently, and your brain is on high alert scanning for danger. During this temporary emergency, resources are routed away from the body functions that are not essential to immediate survival. Body systems like the immune system, reproduction, detoxification and digestion are temporarily slowed or even halted.
As soon as the threat has passed, the body then is able to return to its normal state of relaxation, also referred to as “rest and digest”. It can now route its resources and energy back to the body systems that are essential to long-term survival, such as digestion and immune function. For our ancestors, these stressors were relatively few and far between, so the body was able to exist most of the time in its relaxed state. In their relatively slow-moving, quiet world this system worked really well for the best chances of short and long term survival.
However, we now live in a very different world. We have constant stress coming at us, and our brain is unable to separate which stressors are life threatening and which are not. To the brain, the stress from trying to get the kids to school on time or from that upcoming work deadline feels identical to the stress of running from a hungry lion. All of the stressors coming at us start running together and eventually life becomes one big mess of stress chemicals. The body is in a constant “fight or flight” mode, with very few resources going to “rest and digest”. For some people, the stress chemicals alone can be enough to cause chronic health issues. For those of us who are already facing chronic health challenges, this imbalance can add to our existing problems. One of those common problems is the inability for the brain to relax into sleep (because if there’s a lion prowling around, the last thing the body should be doing is sleeping!).
So then the challenge becomes how do we reduce those stress chemicals in order to allow the body to relax and to not only sleep, but to be able to be more balanced for our long term health and healing. The best thing of course is to prevent those stress chemicals from being released in the first place. But when they have been released, we need to be able to signal the brain that we’re safe now and allow those chemicals to clear. We’ll dive into those issues in part 2 of this article next week. Sign up now for my newsletter so you don’t miss out, and get my FREE ebook, 6 Strategies for Resilience with Chronic Illness!
