Sleep on your left side. During the third trimester, try sleep on your left side, to allow for the best blood flow to the fetus and to your uterus and kidneys. Avoid lying flat on your back for long period, since the increased pressure on your back and intestines can cause discomfort and make it difficult to sleep. You can place a pillow between your knees to help your sleep more comfortably on your side.

Take naps. Naps may be beneficial. Research suggests that a planned thirty to sixty minute nap during the day can improve alertness and memory and can reduce symptoms of daytime sleepiness. It is noteworthy that in the National Sleep Foundation’s Women and Sleep Poll 1998, just over 50 percent of pregnant women reported taking at least one weekday nap and 60 percent reported taking at least one weekend nap. However, that taking naps may not be advisable for people who experience insomnia.

Eat nutritious foods. Unquestionably, it is crucial to eat and drink well when you are pregnant. What you eat and drink can affect the quality of you are pregnant. What you eat and drink can affect the quality of your sleep, particularly during pregnancy. Drink lots of fluids during the day, especially water. However, try to decrease your intake of fluids before bedtime so that you do not exacerbate your need to use the bathroom during the night. To prevent heartburn, avoid eating large amounts of spicy, acidic, or fried foods. You will find that it is also beneficial to eat several light meals throughout the day rather than a large meal close to bedtime. Foods high in protein and iron recommended. Also if you experience nausea while you’re trying to sleep, try frequent bland snacks throughout the day.

Exercise regularly. Regular activity will help you stay healthy improve your circulation, and reduce leg cramps. It will help you sleep better. However, finish your vigorous exercise activities within three to four hours of bedtime. Working out too close to your bedtime may make it more difficult to fall asleep.

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Suddenly you’ll be woken up by a particularly harrowing episode or just before you’re shpt or pushed over the cliff, for instance. You’ll be scared, anxious, and very alert and will probably be able to recall your nightmare in great detail. Then you’ll trouble getting back to sleep.

They’re different from night terror. Which suddenly appear out of deep non-dreaming sleep and normally happen in the first half of the night. In a night terror, you’ll sit up suddenly and scream, but you probably won’t wake up even though, rather scarify for your bed partner, your eyes might be wide open. You might sweat and your heart rare could shoot up three times its normal rate and much higher than with nightmares.

Amazingly, you’ll probably have no memory of it in the mornings. Even if you are woken up when you’re having a night terror, you won’t be able to recall what happened. Although studies have shown non REM dreams are repetitive and thought like, with little imagery.

Action Plan To Counter Strike
After you’ve had a nightmare, write down any factors that may have contributed to the bed dream. What did you eat yesterday? Did you have any alcohol? Are you stressed? Did you go to bed at a different time from usual? Did you watch a scary film? Are you ill or are you taking medication? All these factors can influence what you dream about.

Fatty and spicy food as well as cheers is thought to increase the chance of nightmares. Stress is also a common trigger whether it’s work, financial difficulties, moving house, relationship problems, bereavement or even pregnancy. Drinking and medication increase the risk too. The same factors influence night terrors particularly stress and being overtired.

you find what‘s causing the nightmares or night terrors, deal with the trigger. That said, it’s not always as easy giving up cheese before bedtime and avoiding late night horror films. Sometimes you won’t know the cause. With nightmares, talking through them even drawing images from them can be help. With night terror, talking often doesn’t help because you can’t remember the content. If they’re really severe and happen often, talk to your doctor about medication such as tranquillizer.

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So how can herbs improve your sleep? Sleep disorder and depression are linked with an imbalance in the brain chemical serotonin, which your body makes from the amino acid tryptophan. Certain herbs can help restore proper serotonin levels in the brain. Other herbs work by triggering your brain’s calming chemicals.

You can buy herbs from health food shops and chemists or, if you’ve got green fingers, you can even grow your own and all you need is a window box. Just stick to the recommended doses as some herbs can be pretty potent. Alternatively, consult a practitioner preferably someone who’s been recommended to your or is a member of respected professional association.

The quality of herbs varies among manufacturers. Poor quality herbs may contain contaminations or only small amounts of active ingredients, so always ask your practitioner for assurance on safety and quality. They should be able to tell you the name of the supplier and all products should be clearly labeled and ideally have a batch has been checked for quality and ensures that it can be traced back to source if there are any problems.

Herbs That Help You Sleep

Chamomile - your grandmother was probably a big believer in chamomile tea. And she was right. Studies have found chamomile has a sedative effect and unlike some herbs it’s safe for pregnant and breastfeeding women. Put it in your bath in the evening. To make a calming tea, add one teaspoon of flower to boiling water and steep in the pan with the lid on for five to ten minutes.

Hops - Yes, it’s a same hop that’s in beer but no, it doesn’t mean you can have a pint before bedtime. Instead, fill a pillow with dried hops like a traditional remedy for sleeplessness and nervous conditions. Tea made from hopes is an acquired taste. It’s pretty bitter, but a spoonful of honey can take the edge off it. You can also buy freeze dried extract in capsule form.

Lavender - One of the most calming herbs, lavender will help you deal with stress related insomnia. Make a calming herbs, lavender will help you deal with stress related insomnia. Make a calming tincture of the herb by steeping it in vodka for a month, then straining. Take a teaspoonful three times a day until your tension lifts. Or make a sachet of lavender to leave under your pillow at night. For headache, rub the essential oil on your temples.

Lemon balm - Also know as Melissa, lemon balm is a sedative and stomach soother often used in combination with other sedative herbs. Add 2 or 3 teaspoons of the dried herbs to a cup of freshly boiled water and let it steep for 5 to 15 minutes for a soothing tea that actually taste nice too.

Valerian - This speeds up the time it takes to get to sleep and reduces night time walking and without the hangover type side effects of Valium and other synthetic sedative. Put 2 to 3 droppersful of tincture made from fresh valerian roots or 1 to 2 teaspoons of dried valerian root in hot water for a bedtime drink. Take no more than one cup a day. Too much can cause headache.

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Cutting Down

=> Limit yourself to two cups of coffee or three or four of tea, but don’t have them too late in the day.

=> If you’re relaying on coffee to give you energy, go for snacks such as banana, dried fruit or a cereal bar, which will do the trick just as well.

=> Replace one of your daily teas or coffees with an alternative. Choose from herbal tea, milk shake, fruit juice, smoothie or even decaffeinated tea or coffee.

Alcohol

If you’ve a few drink, you’ve not likely to have much more trouble getting to sleep probably on the same stairs on the way up to bed. But you’ll probably wake up again as alcohol has just as disruptive an effect on sleep as caffeine. Although it’s sedative, it causes the release of adrenaline and block tryptophan, which helps the body make the calming brain chemical serotonin which is vital for sleep. One unit of alcohol which is half a pint of beer, one small glass wine takes about one hour to metabolize. So if you drink three glasses of wine at 10pm, expect you sleep to be disrupted from around 1am. Again some people metabolize it faster than others.

Cutting Down

=> Have at least two drink free days a week.

=> Don’t drink more than two units of alcohol per day if you’re women, three units if you’re a man.

=> Alternate an alcoholic drink with a non-alcoholic one such as non-alcoholic beer, water or soft drink.

=> Sip your drink slowly so it lasts longer.

=> Try to eat before you go drinking since it will help reduce the amount of alcohol absorbed by your body.

Nicotine

The increased risk of cancer and heart disease not a good enough reason to make you give up smoking? Well, this one might work. The average smoker takes twice as long as fall asleep as a non smoker and sleeps 30 minutes less. You may feel relaxed after having a cigarette, but it’s probably because you’ve satisfied the craving rather the release of adrenaline. Like alcohol, once metabolized, nicotine can wake you up. Nicotine can cause difficulty falling asleep, problems waking in the morning and may also cause nightmare.

Cutting Down

=> If you’re women, don’t pack it in the second half of your menstrual cycle, through. Researchers have found that you’re much more likely to succeed if you do it the first half because nicotine withdrawal symptoms like depression, anxiety and irritability.

=> If you can use simply willpower, that’s great. Otherwise there’s host of options from nicotine patches and self help manuals to acupuncture and hypnotherapy. Nope of these will work unless you really want to give up, though.

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Are You Overweight?

Find out by checking your Body Mass Index (BMI). You can do this dividing your weight (kg) by your height squared (m). If your BMI is greater than 25 your are overweight. If your BMI is greater than 30 your are obese. Another measure is your collar size. Over 16.5 inches and you’re likely to snore because the muscles around your windpipe can’t support the fat around it when you’re asleep. In all these cases you need to lose weight even a small loss can improve symptom. Men tend to put on weight around their necks and waists, whereas women seem to put on weight around the thighs. So when you lay on your back your fatty tissue adds pressure onto the airway, blocking it off and making your snore. Women airway is not collapsing and not just because of where her weight is, but because women’s airway walls tend to be less flexible and therefore less prone to yield to pressure where they’re asleep.

Do You Smoke or Drink?

Cigarette smoke irritates the lining of the nasal cavity and throat causing swelling and catarrh. If the nasal passages become congested it’s difficult to breathe through your nose because there’s less airflow. And because congestion gets worse with each cigarette, the more you smoke, the worse you’re snoring. Even passive smoking can cause chronic inflammation of the nose and throat passages, thus increasing the risk of snoring. Until you give up don’t smoke for at least 4 hours before bed. Drinking triggers snoring as it reduces the tone of the muscles that keep the upper breathing passage open. So keep to the limit and avoid drinking just before bedtime.

Do You breathe Through Your Mouth?

Open your mouth and make a snoring noise. Now close your mouth and try to make the same noise. If you can only snore with your mouth open then you are a “mouth breather”. You’ll probably wake up with a dry mouth and sometimes a sore throat because of the strain of snoring. When we breath in through the nose the air passes over the curved part of the soft palate in a gentle flow into the throat without creating unnecessary turbulence. When we breathe in through the mouth, however, the air hits the back of the throat head on can create enormous vibrations in the soft tissue. Try to breathe through your nose and ask your pharmacist for pharmacist for gadgets such as chin strips that help keep your mouth closed. To help clear your nose, put a few drops of eucalyptus on you r pillow case.

Are Your Nostril Too Narrow?

Looking in a mirror, press the side of one nostril to close it. With your mouth closed, breathe in through your other nostril. If the nostril tends to collapse try propping it open with the clean end of match stick. If breathing is easier with the nostril propped open (try both side), you may need something to open your nasal airways. Small or collapsing nostrils can prevent you from breathing through your nose. This encourages mouth breathing, and it’s the air hitting the back of the throat that causes the snoring noise. Try nasal strips which you place on the outside of the nostrils to stop them collapsing.

Do You Sleep On Your Back?

This can cause snoring as it allows the fresh of your throat to relax and block airways. Also the fatty tissue around your neck can add pressure on the airway. Sleep on your side, if possible. A well know trick is sleeping with a tennis ball sewn into the back of your pyjama top.

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Poor Memory

During a good night’s sleep, in the REM stage, the brain busily replenishes the neurotransmitters that organize neural networks vital for remembering, learning, performance and problem solving. If you deprive the brain of sleep, you get less REM sleep. The crossword takes twice as long to finish, you’ll forget the names of close friends and you’ll stare at the tax form for days before even attempting to fill it out.

More Car Accidents

According to one study drowsiness or sleep disorders was a factor in about half of all traffic accidents and 36% of fatal accidents. Another study compared the reaction times between people who were sleep deprived and those who’d been drinking alcohol. This suggests that driving when tired is as dangerous as driving drunk.

Constant Colds

With a tissue pressed to your face at all times, no one’s really seen you properly for weeks which is probably a good thing considering your dry, flaky red nose, cracked lips and streaming eyes. Recent research demonstrated that the nightly loss of four hours of sleep over 10 days in healthy young adults significantly reduced their immune function. This is because it reduces the number of white blood cells which are responsible for the production of antibodies that fight disease.

Old Before Your Time

Research suggests that missing sleep can actually speed up ageing. Sleeping for only four hours a night for less than a week reduces the body’s ability to process and store carbohydrates and regulate hormone levels changes which are similar to those of advanced ageing. Another study found that sleeping under five hours per night shortened the life span although sleeping more than nine hours also did the same.

Makes Your Fat

Lack of sleep makes you hungry and more probe to putting on weight and one of the main causes of snoring and sleep apnea. The key to this is the hormone leptin, which signals when the body needs or dose not need more food. Leptin levels rise during the sleep and this tells your brain that you’ve eaten enough and don’t need any more calories. When you’re sleep deprived, leptin levels are low, which send signal to your brain that you need more calories. Your brain thinks that there’s a shortage of food and that you need to eat more, when in fact you’ve eaten.

High Blood Pressure

Blood pressure usually falls during the sleep cycle, however, interrupted sleep can adversely affect this normal decline, leading to hypertension and cardiovascular problems. One study of nurses showed that those sleeping for five hours or fewer had 45% greater risk of developing heart disease than those sleeping for eight hours. Oversleeping also had risks, however. Those sleeping nine to eleven hours increased their by 38%

Diabetes Risk

Research has also show that insufficient sleep impairs the body’s ability to use insulin, which can lead to the onset of diabetes.

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According to the National Sleep Foundation’s Women and Sleep Poll (1998), in which over one thousand women ages thirty to sixty were interviewed, the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and menopause can affect sleep. Specifically, 25 to 50 percent of the women surveyed reported that menstruation symptoms (bloating, tender breasts, headaches, and cramp/pain) disturb their sleep for approximately two to three days of their cycle.

Many of the women also reported other sleep difficulties during menstruation, including talking longer to fall asleep, walking at night and being unable to fall back to sleep, feeling less refreshed in the morning, having difficulty getting out of bed in the morning, and walking earlier. Nearly 70 percent of the women surveyed felt sleepiest the week prior to or during the first few days of their period. One woman explained:

Since the age of forty, my sleep has been much disrupted during my menstrual cycle. During menstruation, I feel so exhausted that I need to retire much earlier than usual, during midcycle each month, I need to go to bed at around eight o’clock when my children go to sleep.

Still, women’s sleep experiences vary greatly during the menstrual cycle. Some women may not have any changes in their sleep, whereas others experience premenstrual hypersomnia, a rare sleep disorder that causes excessive daytime somnolence in association with menstruation.

We can now begin to draw conclusion regarding sleep changes over the course of the menstrual cycle, from information gathered in studies conducted during the 1980s and 1990s (driver and Baker 1998). The sleep changed that you and other women may experience over the course of your menstrual cycle can linked to increasing and decreasing hormone levels.

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It is noteworthy, however, that women often attribute their poor sleep to psychological factors, and while men blame their sleep difficulties on work related issues. Other studies have examined sex differences in the architecture of sleep. It appears, according to a small number of studies, that a few sex differences in sleep architecture do exist. A relatively recent study demonstrated that slow wave sleep decrease at a later beginning to assess the influence of estrogen, progesterone, and other hormones on women’s sleep.

This article is focused on the sleep wake pattern changes that occur in many women over that course of their menstrual cycles. For example, recent research concludes that during menstruation women tend to get less restful sleep, and that after ovulation (i.e, when progesterone levels begin to increase) some women find it more difficult to fall asleep.

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If a major depression is present, you need to see a doctor or psychiatrist. There are many different and effective medications for treating depression. Not all people will respond to the same medication and you might have to trial different medication to find the ideal on. Most drugs for depression work by altering the brain’s neurochemical balances. Many take several weeks to work and treatment should be persisted with for at least 6 months.

Cognitive behavioral and other talking therapies may be useful adjuncts to treatment of depression depending on its severity. Sleep deprivation and light therapy can be used as alternatives or in conjunction with medication, even if the depression is non-seasonal. However, these treatments must only be undertaken with appropriate medical guidance.

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There are many different relaxation techniques and you should choose one that suits you. Some people find meditation useful, while others enjoy yoga or tai chi. People with very high muscle tension may find it useful to do the progressive relaxation exercise, first described by Edmund Jacobsen in 1983.

This exercise is intended to relax step by step all the different group of muscle in the body. It involves lying on the floor on your back with legs uncrossed and out straight, and arms down by your sides. You eyes should be closed. The exercises should last about 30-60 minutes, depending on the degree of muscle tension present, but can be abbreviated. Each muscle group in turn is tensed, and then suddenly allowed to go limp, followed by relaxation for a couple of minutes. Start at your feet and gradually work up your body, tensing and relaxing each large muscle group in turn until your reach your head.

In addition to the other health benefits that regular exercise brings to the body, it can also help to improve sleep. Physical exercise tires us out and results in the release of chemicals and hormones in the body that produce sleep of a better quality, including the proportion of slow wave sleep that we experience. Exercising in the late afternoon may help you to sleep better, however, vigorous exercise within 3 to 4 hours of bedtime can interfere with your sleep.

Beside environmental temperature, variations in our body temperature also play an important role in determining the quality of sleep we have during the night. Our body temperature falls naturally as part of the circadian rhythm towards the end of the day as we prepare to sleep. Having a long soak in hot tub or a bath in hot water, at least an hour before going to bed, can help raise the core body temperature and then let it drop more quickly, decreasing the transition time to sleep. Water can also have a relaxing effect on us, which also enhance sleepiness.

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