Hypersomnia is a condition in which you feel excessive sleepiness during the day. It may occur even after long stretches of sleep. Another name for hypersomnia is excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS). It can be a primary condition or a secondary condition. Hypersomnia is characterized by recurrent episodes of excessive daytime sleepiness or prolonged nighttime sleep.
People with hypersomnia can be irresistibly drawn to napping repeatedly throughout the day, sometimes at the most inappropriate, inconvenient or even dangerous times. When driving, for instance.
If you are suffering from such condition, here we are suggesting 18 suitable ways to handle hypersomnia in adults.
Changing routine
1. Take naps whenever possible
Naps reduce feelings of sleepiness and increase alertness but also improve performance in areas such as reaction time, co-ordination, logical reasoning, memory consolidation, symbol recognition, mood, and emotion regulation. There is also evidence to suggest daytime naps may decrease blood pressure in some individuals.
Studies show that an afternoon nap is great for adults, too. There’s no need to feel lazy for indulging in daytime sleep. A short nap in the mid-afternoon can boost memory, improve job performance, lift your mood, make you more alert, and ease stress. It also helps to overcome hypersomnia.
When you’re ready to take your nap, pick a dark room. Blocking out the light will help you fall asleep quicker. If it’s not possible to get into a dark room, get yourself a sleep mask. This will give you artificial darkness.
2. Maintain a regular sleep schedule
Keeping a regular sleep schedule, even on weekends, maintains the timing of the body’s internal clock and can help you fall asleep and wake up more easily. Even if real life stands in the way of achieving the perfect sleep routine, making just a few small changes can improve your sleep dramatically.
People are most likely to be at their sleepiest at two points: between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. and between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. The better the quality of sleep you get, the less likely you are to experience significant daytime sleepiness. Circadian rhythm also dictates your natural bedtime and morning wakeup schedules. Maintaining a proper sleep schedule can help in dealing hypersomnia and associated depression.
3. Take help from friends and family
Friends and family have the major role play in our lives. It is important to surround ourselves with family and friends for support and comfort in both times of joy and distress. Studies have shown that having supportive relationships is a strong protective factor against mental illnesses, also to treat hypersomnia with associated feelings of depression and helps to increase our mental well-being.
Preventing hypersomnia
4. Create peaceful sleeping environment
Temperature, lighting, and noise should be controlled to make the bedroom conducive to falling (and staying) asleep. Your bed should feel comfortable and if you have a pet that sleeps in the room with you, consider having the pet sleep somewhere else if it tends to make noise in the night.
Avoid noise to keep your bedroom quiet. Darkness is important for deep, restorative sleep and a regular sleep clock. Make use of eye blinds can enhance your sleep quality. Hence, a deep sleep for a fixed period of time will help you in managing hypersomnia.
5. Avoid alcohol
Alcohol has been found in effecting sleep. For those people who occasionally use alcohol, it improves sleep initially. But high alcohol doses result in sleep disturbances and hypersomnia. Studies have shown that consumption of alcohol and other drugs results in lower sleep quality. Caffeine is a stimulant found in coffee, tea, soda, and chocolate. A greater amount of caffeine can cause a loss of REM sleep.
Please ensure not to make yourself addict to alcohol and stimulant to deal with sleep changes. Stay away from the company or friends who intake drugs. Promise yourself to take care of your health and habits. Ultimately, you will be able to get rid of your hypersomnia issues and associated depression feelings.
6. Avoid medications
Medicines such as anti-depressant may cause feeling of drowsiness. If you want to stop feeling of drowsiness that may lead to hypersomnia, it is recommended to go for other activities. Indulging in walking, exercising, and setting up other daily routine changes can help prevent drowsiness and hypersomnia.
7. Avoid working late at night
Working for a long period of time may increase the chances of mental issues. You may work in shifts like morning and evening as per your feasibility along with adjusting your schedule. Over-burdonizing and staying up late at night may increase the risk for heart disease. It disrupts your circadian rhythm and hence increase hypersomnia at some stage of your life.
So it is best for you to avoid awaking and work late at night unless it is urgent to work or stay awake.
Adopting manageable actions
8. Sleep few hours long at night
Hypersomnia is the condition when a person sleeps a lot and still having less energy. In order to deal with hypersomnia and depression issues, the best thing is to wind up all your work and go to bed. You have to strict tou your sleep schedule but along with that you can increase sleep timing a few hour long at night.
May be you are facing hypersomnia because you could not sleep well at night or have trouble sleep. So, it is essential to have great sound sleep at night.
9. Exercise daily
Regular exercise can improve sleep quality and duration. However, exercising immediately before bedtime can have a stimulant effect on the body and should be avoided. Try to finish exercising at least three hours before you plan to retire for the night to better deal with hypersomnia issues.
10. Do enjoyable activities
Doing activities that fascinate you like walking, listening music, playing or outing with friends or family. These pleasurable activities increase your mental attention and divert you from being passive and getting into feeling of depression.
11. Use bed for sleep only
The bed is for sleeping and having sex, and that’s it. If you suffer from sleep problems, do not balance the checkbook, study, or make phone calls, such as in bed or even in the bedroom, and avoid watching television or listening to the radio. All these activities can increase alertness and make it difficult to fall asleep.
Practice bedtime soothing rituals also. The soothing process helped your body relax and signaled to your mind that it was time to cool down, let go and sleep soundly to overcome hypersomnia.
12. Avoid eating heavy meal
Conventional wisdom says that eating before bed causes weight gain because your metabolism slows down when you fall asleep. This causes any undigested calories to be stored as fat. Yet many health experts say that eating before bed is perfectly fine and may even improve sleep or weight loss.
Eating a large meal before bed can disrupt your sleep. If you could not sleep soundly, then you will feel low in energy when wake up. Hence, avoid taking heavy meals to prevent hypersomnia and energy issues.
13. Reduce stress
Now the question is how to reduce stress? Several relaxation therapies and stress reduction methods can relax the mind and body before going to bed. It includes progressive muscle relaxation, deep breathing techniques, meditation, etc.
Progressive muscle relaxation is a method that helps relieve tension. In progressive muscle relaxation, you tense a group of muscles as you breathe in, and you relax them as you breathe out. You work on your muscle groups in a specific order. When your body is physically relaxed, you cannot feel anxious. If you have trouble falling asleep, this method may also help to deal with your hypersomnia trouble.
Medications
14. Stimulants
Doctor may prescribed you some stimulant to prevent hypersomnia. Stimulant, any drug that excites any bodily function, but more specifically those that stimulate the brain and central nervous system. Stimulants induce alertness, elevated mood, wakefulness, increased speech and motor activity and decrease appetite. Their therapeutic use is limited, but their mood-elevating effects make some of them potent drugs of abuse.
The major stimulant drugs are amphetamines and related compounds, methylxanthines (methylated purines), cocaine, and nicotine.
15. Antidepressants
Antidepressants, such as fluoxetine (Prozac), citalopram (Celexa), paroxetine (Paxil), sertraline (Zoloft) Sodium oxybate (Xyrem) is used to treat excessive daytime sleepiness.
It should be noted that when these medications are used for sleeping and pain relieving properties, it is in much lower doses than when used in the treatment of depression.
Therapy
16. Counseling
Psychotherapy is the use of psychological methods, particularly when based on regular personal interaction with adults, to help a person change behavior and overcome problems in desired ways. Counselling is a process of talking about and working through your personal problems with a counsellor. The counsellor helps you to address your problems in a positive way by helping you to clarify the issues, explore options, develop strategies and increase self-awareness.
17. Cognitive behavioral therapy
The therapy is used to help you identify attitudes and beliefs that hinder your sleep. These negative thoughts involve worries and stress that keep you awake. A therapist enables you to process your thoughts and feelings about sleep.
18. Ruling out other mental issues
A physician or medical practitioner will rule out other sleep disorders, medication side-effects, substance misuse, depression, and other physical and mental illnesses. Some medications and medical conditions can affect sleep. If the above mentioned ways would not benefit, they must go to the clinician to diagnose the cause.
Summary
Hypersomnia issues can be treated if you are motivated in spending quality time of your life and take your life in optimistic direction. By changing a little bit of your routine and taking manageable actions can help you in dealing with hypersomnia. It would be best to avoid treating yourself via medications as it may have negative influence unless you are at risk. Psychotherapy is the safe method to solve your issues and move yourself into spending your life in better direction.
Moving forward with Psychotherapy
Fortunately, Ahealo.com offers a global ePsychotherapy platform that allows clients to book an online anonymous private appointment with a broad skill range of psychotherapists at an affordable cost and desired schedule.
Alternatively, if you need to seek psychotherapy, be sure to check out web.ahealo.com. Ahealo is an online psychotherapy platform with a diverse range of psychotherapists for many different fields of mental challenges. Ahealo provides ePsychotherapy at an affordable price, confidential, convenient (through a web page 1-1 private video call), and at your comfortable schedule.
With these options, we believe your weight change issues can be resolved soon.
Stay well.
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