Do you sleep like a baby or do you sleep like a dolphin? Baby’s sleep deeply with their muscles relaxed and their mind at ease. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? When was the last time you slept that way? Unfortunately, most of us sleep like dolphins, which is to say not completely asleep and not totally awake. Dolphins turn off half their brain and close one eye, allowing them to be partly asleep and partly awake at the same time. Stress from our day-to-day life can keep our muscles tense at night and our mind on “repetitive stress mode,” reliving the day’s events. That’s why I have a biofeedback therapist in my chiropractic clinic who teaches our patients how to breathe like a baby, and how to help relax both body and mind, so that they can sleep like a baby at night.
Category: sleep problems and chiropractic
As a chiropractor, I treat many older people. Over the years, I have noted that as men and women age, the quality of sleep they get at night alters drastically, especially among women who are post-menopausal. I’d often attributed the sleep differences between my particular male and female chiropractic patients, to stress levels, mainly because the women who complained about not getting enough sleep were more “tightly-wound” than most of men who came to see me. However, a new study conducted by researchers in the Netherlands, indicates that even though elderly women in a sleep study reported shorter and a poorer quality of sleep, they were actually getting longer and less-interrupted sleep than the elderly men in the study.
The participants, aged 59 to 97 years old, were asked to wear an accelerometer that measured their sleep activity, and also to keep a sleep diary for six consecutive nights. According to the study, the female participants reported an increase in the time it took them to fall asleep, a shorter sleep time, and poorer sleep quality than the male participants reported. However, after examining data from the accelerometer measurements researchers discovered that the women had actually slept longer and experienced less sleep disturbances than the men. In fact, the study found that men actually overestimated the amount of sleep they got and the quality of their sleep. In other words, the men may have been “daydreaming” about getting a good night’s sleep!
Insomnia seems to be common these days, and people are walking out of drugstores with over-the-counter sleep aids or they’re leaving the office of their medical doctor with prescriptions for drugs that promise to give them a good night’s sleep. As a chiropractor, I hear from my patients that most of the time, the non-prescription meds don’t work at all for them, and that even if the pills their medical doctor prescribes may work for a while, they are well-aware of the harmful side effects of these drugs, including addiction. That is why many people, like my patients, are choosing a natural alternative, like chiropractic, to help them sleep at night.