A Parents Problem (Child not sleeping through night!!)

“My 4 year old daughter has always been a really good / heavy sleeper.

Recently (At the start of her Xmas holidays after her first term of school) she has been waking up arond 1am and staying awake for about 3 hours on average.

She gets up and says she can’t sleep and won’t stay in bed.

As I am sure you can imagine this is driving us up the wall especially now as we are back at work.

So far we’ve tried:

- Putting her back to bed without saying anything to her - she just gets straight back out of bed.

- Telling her to go back to bed - we just enter a debate about it.

- Putting her back to bed and stroking her head to help her get back to sleep - spend about 15 mins doing it and she doesn’t go to sleep and we’ve made a rod for our own back!!!

- Putting her to bed and telling her we will check on her every X minutes - she stays in bed until she thinks we’ve forgotten but now expects us to check on her all the time throughout the night!!!!

- telling her to sit on the step until she is tired or go back to bed - sort of works but means we have to stay up with her for an hour or so

- Incentivising her to stay in bed - if you stay in bed we’ll do X, Y or Z wiht you in the morning - doesn;t work!!!

- Taking toys away - works but ends in tears and wakes the rest of the house up.

- Using Medised to help her get back to sleep and reset her body clock (Not sure if this is ethical but all else isn’t working)

The big problem is we don’t know what to do now and we stay awake at night expecting her to get out of bed and is really running us down. We know we have two problems - the attention and that her body clock is now set to wake up around 1am!!!

The one we are trying tonight is two fold -

1. We’ve told her we’ll send her to stay with Aunt Spiker (evil aunt from James and Giant peach)

and

2. We’ve agreed that if she sleeps through consequitively for 14 days we’ll buy her a bike.

Anyone else got some suggestions?? (We’ve considered adoption and locking her in her room at night - neither sits well with us though)”

RESPONSES:

• “We got a clock/light (a Thomas one for my 4 and a bit year old boy) that is a nightlight during sleepy hours and goes off at a set time. We simply laid down the instructions that if the light is on, you should be in bed, quiet. Getting up for toilet breaks is fine, but back to bed until the clock changes. Worked a treat, he stays in bed instead of bouncing out at 5am!”

• “let her stay up for an “In the night garden”-a-thon on DVD. Then she’ll pass out eventually at midnight or 1am and stay asleep until dawn. Arm yourself with a bottle of good wine and book you’ve been meaning to read. That should reset her circadian rhythm!”

• “I find a gruff “get back to bed NOW!!!!” seems to work”

• “We ocassionally have the same with our 5 year old. We found the best solution is to have a mad day of physical activity, avoiding any sugary treats, then go with Stoner’s DVD / TV fest. Her bodyclock is reset and everything’s back to normal the next day (in bed at 7 pm up at 6.30 am)”

A Mother’s Plea For HELP!!

How To Keep Your Child from Waking Up Too Early

For most parents the pitter patter of little feet running across the bedroom floor, followed by an energetic, “Good morning!” is both adorable and distressing at the same time. If your child rises before the sun, there are a few things that you can do to keep them sleeping a little bit longer

• 1

  Reduce napping. When children wake too early in the morning, it is often because they are getting too much sleep during the day. If your child still takes an afternoon nap, consider eliminating it entirely or waking them after an hour.

• 2

  Plan afternoon activities. One of the best ways to ensure your child gets a good night’s sleep is to offer late afternoon and evening activities, like walks and bike rides, that will tire them out before bedtime.

• 3

  Put them to bed an hour later. If your child is waking too early, you may want to adjust their bedtime by an hour or so. Most children will stay in bed an hour later in the morning for every extra hour that they are awake in the evening.

• 4

  Set an alarm clock. Even if your child wakes before the alarm sounds, you can create a rule that they have to play quietly in their room until the music starts or buzzer goes off.

• 5

  Create a restful environment. Check to see if your child’s bedding and mattress are comfortable. Install room darkening blinds if your child seems to wake up as soon as the sun rises and make sure your child’s night light is not too harsh.

• 6

  Maintain a consistent bedtime routine and schedule. Make sure that your child goes to bed at the same time every evening. It is also important to create a consistent nighttime routine, to eliminate unnecessary stress in your child.

• 
  

  Tips & Warnings

  • Talk to your pediatrician to see how much sleep your child needs during a twenty four hour period and adjust nap times and bedtimes accordingly.

  • Maintain consistent bedtime and awaking time even on the weekends. Allowing children to stay up later on the weekends (or sleep in) may cause sleep difficulty during the week.

  
  

Common Sleeping Conditions

INSOMNIA:

Insomnia is difficulty getting to sleep or staying asleep for long enough to feel refreshed the next morning, even though you’ve had enough opportunity to sleep.

Most people have problems sleeping at some point in their life. It’s thought that a third of people in the UK have bouts of insomnia. Insomnia tends to be more common in women and more likely to occur with age.

It’s difficult to define what normal sleep is as everyone is different. Your age, lifestyle, environment and diet all play a part in influencing the amount of sleep you need. 

The most common symptoms of insomnia are:

•   difficulty falling asleep

•   waking up during the night

•   waking up early in the morning

•   feeling irritable and tired and finding it difficult to function during the day

SLEEP APNEA:

Sleep apnea is a common disorder in which you have one or more pauses in breathing or shallow breaths while you sleep.

Breathing pauses can last from a few seconds to minutes. They often occur 5 to30 times or more an hour. Typically, normal breathing then starts again, sometimes with a loud snort or choking sound.

Sleep apnea usually is a chronic (ongoing) condition that disrupts your sleep. You often move out of deep sleep and into light sleep when your breathing pauses or becomes shallow.

This results in poor sleep quality that makes you tired during the day. Sleep apnea is one of the leading causes of excessive daytime sleepiness.

SLEEP PARALYSIS:

As you will be completely aware of the fact that you cannot move, the experience can be very frightening. However, sleep paralysis is not dangerous to your health.

Sometimes, people hallucinate while their body is paralysed. This involves seeing or hearing things that are not there. However, this does not happen to everyone.

You may be unable to move for a short period of time, which could last from a few seconds to several minutes. After this, you will be able to move and speak as normal.

Many people only experience sleep paralysis once or twice in their life. If it happens several times a month or more regularly, it is known as isolated sleep paralysis.

REM SLEEP BEHAVIOUR DISORDER:The main symptom of REM sleep behavior disorder is dream-enacting behaviors, sometimes violent, causing self-injury or injury to the bed partner.

The dream-enacting behaviors are usually non-directed and may include punching, kicking, leaping, or jumping from bed while still asleep.

The person may be awakened or may wake spontaneously during the attack and vividly recall the dream that corresponds to the physical activity.

SLEEP WALKING AND TALKING:

A sleepwalker usually looks as though they are wide-awake. Their eyes are open and they can walk around and do various activities, like dressing or undressing or even going to the bathroom. It has actually happened that people have driven cars in their sleep. The episode usually only lasts a few minutes, but can last as much as half an hour. People of any age can walk in their sleep, but the most common age is 4-8. The tendency seems to run in families.

Sleep talking involves the sleeping person mumbling words or carrying on a conversation with you or someone in their dreams.

Most people (80%) who wet their beds, wet only at night. Also, they tend to have no other symptoms other than wetting the bed.

Other symptoms could suggest psychological causes or problems with the nervous system or kidneys and should alert the family or health care provider that this may be more than routine bed-wetting.

•   Wetting during the day

•   Frequency, urgency, or burning on urination

•   Straining, dribbling, or other unusual symptoms with urination

•   Cloudy or pinkish urine, or blood stains on underpants or pajamas

•   Soiling, being unable to control bowel movements (fecal incontinence or encopresis)

•   Constipation

Frequency of urination is different for children than for adults.

•   While many adults urinate only three or four times a day, children urinate much more frequently, in some cases as often as 10-12 times each day.

•   “Frequency” as a symptom should be judged in terms of what is normal for that particular child.

Fecal impaction may show up as constipation. Both fecal impaction and constipation cause straining, which can injure the nearby urinary sphincters, muscles that control flow of urine out of the body.

•   Fecal compaction is when feces becomes so tightly packed in the lower intestine and rectum that passing a bowel movement becomes very difficult or even impossible.

•   The hard, tightly packed feces in the rectum can press on the bladder and surrounding nerves and muscles, interfering with bladder control.

•   Neither fecal impaction nor constipation is that unusual in children.

NIGHT TERRORS:

Sleep terrors differ from nightmares. The dreamer of a nightmare wakes up from the dream and remembers details, but a person who has a sleep terror episode remains asleep. Children usually don’t remember anything about their sleep terrors in the morning. Adults may recall a dream fragment they had during the sleep terrors.

Like sleepwalking and nightmares, sleep terrors are a parasomnia — an undesired occurrence during sleep. Sleep terrors usually occur during the first third of the sleep period.

During a sleep terror episode, a person might:

•                  Sit up in bed

•                  Scream or shout

•                  Kick and thrash

•                  Sweat, breathe heavily and have a racing pulse

•                  Be hard to awaken

•                  Be inconsolable

•                  Get out of bed and run around the house

•                  Engage in violent behavior (more common in adults)

                  Stare wide-eyed

Teeth grinding (bruxism) can affect people in many different ways. Some of the short-term effects go away when you stop grinding your teeth. But some can be long lasting or permanent.

Exploding head syndrome is a condition that causes the sufferer to occasionally experience a tremendously loud noise as originating from within his or her own head, usually described as the sound of an explosion, gunshot, door slamming, roar, waves crashing against rocks, loud voices, a ringing noise, the terrific bang on a tin tray, or the sound of an electrical arcing (buzzing). In some cases an instant flash of what is perceived as video “static” is reported.

This syndrome can also cause the sufferer to feel an extreme rush or adrenaline kick going through his or her head, sometimes multiple times. In most cases, it occurs when they are in a state between asleep and awake. Some sufferers report familiarization with the subsequent fear or panic element such that they no longer consciously experience it. In some cases repeated attacks lead to the sufferer gaining a fear of sleeping or resting, as this is the most common time for attacks to take place, and this can lead to the development of sleeping disorders such as insomnia.

In some cases it is isolated on the left side of the head, and seems to come from the inner ear region.

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder involving recurrent seizures. A seizure, also called convulsion, is a sudden change in behavior caused by increased electrical activity in the brain.

The increase in electrical activity may result in unconsciousness and violent body shakes or simply a staring spell that may go unnoticed. There is no known exact cause for epilepsy but a number of factors may be at work. It can be brought on by anything that affects the brain, including tumors and strokes. Sometimes epilepsy is inherited. Often, no cause can be found.

There is an inherent relationship between sleep and epilepsy. Sleep activates the electrical charges in the brain that result in seizures and seizures are timed according to the sleep wake cycle. For some people, seizures occur exclusively during sleep. This is especially true for a particular type of epilepsy known as benign focal epilepsy of childhood, also known as Rolandic epilepsy. When seizures occur during sleep, they may cause awakenings that are sometimes confused with insomnia. Epilepsy patients are often unaware of the seizures that occur while they sleep. They may suffer for years from daytime fatigue and concentration problems without ever knowing why.

For people with epilepsy, sleep problems are a double-edged sword; epilepsy disturbs sleep and sleep deprivation aggravates epilepsy. The drugs used to treat epilepsy may also disturb sleep. Because lack of sleep is a trigger for seizures, achieving healthy sleep on a nightly basis is essential for people with epilepsy.

The main symptom of excessive sleepiness is a pathological need for sleep during the day despite enough sleep time at night. Often, it is accompanied by a need for extended sleep time at night.

The hallmark of excessive sleepiness is repeated bouts of napping during the day, often at inappropriate times. These naps come on suddenly and the person may feel powerless to prevent it. They rarely provide any relief and tend to continue throughout the day. The sleepiness is often accompanied by changes in mood and cognition such as anxiety, irritability, decreased energy, restlessness, slow thinking and speech, loss of appetite, hallucinations, and memory difficulty. These changes along with the tendency to nap at inappropriate times can have a negative impact on a person’s ability to hold a job and maintain social and familial obligations.

Narcolepsy is a neurological disorder that affects the control of sleep and wakefulness. People with narcolepsy experience excessive daytime sleepiness and intermittent, uncontrollable episodes of falling asleep during the daytime. These sudden sleep attacks may occur during any type of activity at any time of the day.In a typical sleep cycle, we initially enter the early stages of sleep followed by deeper sleep stages and ultimately (after about 90 minutes) rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. For people suffering from narcolepsy, REM sleep occurs almost immediately in the sleep cycle as well as periodically during the waking hours. It is in REM sleep that we can experience dreams and muscle paralysis that explains some of the symptoms of narcolepsy.

Narcolepsy usually begins between the ages of 15 and 25, but it can become apparent at any age. In many cases, narcolepsy is undiagnosed and, therefore, untreated.

Symptoms of narcolepsy include:

•   Excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS): In general, EDS interferes with normal activities on a daily basis, whether or not a person with narcolepsy has sufficient sleep at night. People with EDS report mental cloudiness, a lack of energy and concentration, memory lapses, a depressed mood, and/or extreme exhaustion.

•   Cataplexy: This symptom consists of a sudden loss of muscle tone that leads to feelings of weakness and a loss of voluntary muscle control. It can cause symptoms ranging from slurred speech to total body collapse depending on the muscles involved and is often triggered by intense emotion, for example surprise, laughter, or anger.

•   Hallucinations: Usually, these delusional experiences are vivid and frequently they are frightening. The content is primarily visual, but any of the other senses can be involved. These are called hypnagogic hallucinations when accompanying sleep onset and hypnopompic hallucinations when occurring during awakening.

Sleep paralysis: This symptom involves the temporary inability to move or speak while falling asleep or waking up. These episodes are generally brief lasting a few seconds to several minutes. After episodes end, people rapidly recover their full capacity to move and speak.

The noise of snoring is caused by parts of the nose and throat - in particular, the soft palate - vibrating as you breathe in and out. At night, the muscles that help keep your airways open relax and become floppy. This causes the airways to narrow and vibrate more, making snoring more likely

A Lamp for Sleeping Lovers

Avoiding having a grumpy lover is the inspiration behind designer Francois Rybarczyk’s Cinna lamp! The lamp was designed to be used when you’re reading in bed while your significant other is trying to catch some Zzzzzs. The opaque shell twists to reveal an adjustable, subtle glow emitted from below that won’t disturb. Got to love the combination of ceramic and cork materials together!

Type Of Sleep Patters

So, you’ve learnt about how sleep patterns work and how they are naturally aligned to the day night cycle. So how about we throw all that out the window and create our own?! It’s actually not as bizarre as it sounds. There are many advantages to adopting a different sleeping pattern, although there can be just as many drawbacks. It will take plenty of planning and commitment so you have to be careful and know what you’re doing or you’ll have on hell of a messed up sleep pattern!

Monophasic Sleep Pattern

Monophasic sleep is essentially what most people would call a normal sleeping pattern. A person sleeps for around 8 hours per night, variable per person. It’s the most common sleeping pattern and the one most societies have adopted. Nothing-abnormal here.

Biphasic Sleep Pattern

Biphasic sleep is where a person sleeps twice per day. Most commonly, it consists of a long sleep during the night with a shorter rest during the day.

While not considered all that common in Britain or America, siestas, a short afternoon nap after lunch, are pretty common in Spain and many Latin American counties.

The siesta takes advantage of what’s called the post lunch dip, a period in the early afternoon after lunch where your body feels a bit more sleepy than usual and can nod off more easily. Siestas are often no more than 30 minutes, any longer and you would go into a deeper stage of sleep, which would be hard to wake up from. When done right, a short afternoon nap provides deep refreshment, and can actually have the same effect of a few extra hours sleep.

Alternatively some people adopt a biphasic sleep pattern by having a much longer nap, say 90 minutes long. This works because it gives the body time to complete a full cycle of sleep so would most likely be in either REM or NREM stage 1 when it’s time to wake up where you would feel naturally awake and refreshed.

Polyphasic Sleep Pattern

This is where it gets interesting! A polyphasic sleep pattern consists of multiple sleeps per day, generally ranging from 4 to 6 periods of sleep per day. There are many different combinations of polyphasic sleep patterns, but the most well known are Everyman, Uberman and Dymaxion.

Everyman

Everyman incorporates a core sleep, usually no longer than 3 hours, giving plenty of time for all the components of NREM and REM sleep to kick in. This is then followed by around three 20-minute naps for refreshment during the day.

Everyman is considered to be one of the easiest, sustainable and flexible polyphasic sleep patterns available. But that’s not to say it is easy! As with any polyphasic sleep pattern, you need a strong amount of dedication and willpower to get through the adjustment period where sleep deprivation is inevitable for the first week or so.

A typical Everyman sleep pattern is a core sleep from 1-4am and 20 minutes naps at 9am, 2pm, and 9pm. These can be adjusted to times that suit you best.

Puredoxyk wrote a blog post sharing here experiences of following the Everyman sleep pattern for six months.

Uberman

Uberman makes use of 6 naps no longer than 30 minutes (usually 20 minutes) at regular intervals throughout the day. As a result, you can get the sleep you need in just 3 hours.

Uberman is one of the hardest sleep patterns to implement and it’s also one of the least flexible. if you miss an nap, you’re likely to encounter strong sleep deprivation until your next nap. This is a sleep pattern that really stretches the limits, but it is possible and it has been done.

Personal development blogger Steve Pavlina tried out the Uberman sleep pattern for 5 months, documenting the process at each stage.

A typical Uberman sleep pattern is a 20 minute nap at 2am, 6am, 10am, 2pm, 6pm, and 10pm.

Dymaxion

Dymaxion sleep is the sleep pattern Buckminster Fuller supposedly used for a number of years. Here you take a 30 minute nap every 6 hours. That’s just 2 hours sleep per night.

It seems no one other than Buckminster Fuller has achieved success with this sleep pattern. Maybe he was someone who naturally required less sleep than others, or maybe it’s just an urban myth and he didn’t actually sustainably use this sleep pattern. Whatever the reason, Dymaxion is a sleep pattern I can’t recommend.

Why they work

The whole idea of polyphasic sleep patterns isn’t as zany as it sounds. The essential deep stages of NREM sleep happen early in the night with the lighter stages and REM sleep occurring later in the night. So the idea of optimising your sleep into concentrated areas to maximise deep sleep certainly makes sense.

How Sleep Pattern Works

Your sleep pattern is like a timepiece which your body can use to understand when it’s time to sleep and when its time to wake. This works alongside your body’s need to sleep which is governed by two factors:

1. How long you have been awake
2. The regular timing of your sleep

The timing of your sleep is controlled by something called the circadian body clock located in the depths of your brain. Once your body clock has decided it’s time to rest, it works with other functions in the body to help prepare you for the night of sleep ahead, stopping the various bodily functions associated with being awake. The same goes for when it’s time to wake, where the reverse happens.

You quickly develop a sleep wake cycle from birth. It’s guided by a number of cues to decide if the time is right for sleep. These include daylight, mealtimes and the regular timing of activities carried out at a certain times of the day.

Our bodies naturally adjust our sleep wake cycles to be in line with the day night cycle. This is down to a hormone called melatonin which naturally secretes itself in darkness to promote sleepiness and suppresses itself during the daylight to keep you awake.

Electric lighting, and before that candles, has had a big effect on our sleep wake cycle, which can be attributed to the suppression of melatonin caused by the light. This can be easily displayed if you go camping. After a few nights in a tent without lighting, you often find yourself going to sleep earlier when the sun sets and getting up earlier in the morning at sunrise. That’s melatonin for you. 

Interestingly, even most blind people are affected by daylight and melatonin since although they can’t actually see daylight, the connections from their eyes to their brain still exist to tell their brain if they’re in daylight or darkness.

Sleep Patterns

A good sleep pattern is the cornerstone to getting great sleep. A messed up sleep pattern is one of the main causes of insomnia. The key to getting it right is to choose a sleep pattern and stick to it like glue.

Don’t think you’re limited to just one sleep and wake time. With an understanding of the stages of sleep and the sleep cycle, you can sleep multiple times during the day and effectively feel great on as little as 3 hours of sleep per day. It’s possible, but it’s not for the faint hearted! To have any chance of succeeding you need to know the theory behind what you’re doing.