The month of March is recognized as sleep awareness month. Many of us can struggle at times to get a good night’s sleep but the consequences can sometimes be more serious than just feeling grumpy or unfocused. The mental health foundation states that sleep and mental health are closely related. Living with a mental health condition can affect your sleep and poor sleep can affect your mental health. We all have nights when it’s hard to fall asleep or we wake up several times. According to the foundation, most sleep problems sort themselves out within a month but longer stretches of bad sleep can seriously affect our lives. Kelly Herbig is the program director of Callaway District Hospital’s Senior Life Solutions program. The program is designed to meet the unique needs of older adults, typically 65 and older, who are experiencing depression, anxiety, or other mental health challenges associated with aging. Herbig said proper sleep is crucial for older adults’ mental health and well-being.
“Absolutely, every month in the program we recognize a topic for mental health. As you know there is a month and a day for everything so we take that topic and use it as our community education not only for our patients but for the activities that we do in the community. Yes, sleep is a very important part. With a good amount of sleep we all tend to typically feel better during the day. One of the things that we do as part of our assessments is to inquire on admission and a couple of times a month is how have they been sleeping. Some of the things we look at is what is their overall sleep pattern throughout their lifetime and then we look at if they’ve had any changes in their sleep pattern recently. If you are not getting good quality sleep it can lead to depression and anxiety and if you have a situation or onset of depression and anxiety that can change your sleep patterns as well.”
Herbig said sleeping all the time can cause problems just like not getting enough sleep but there are things that can be done to enhance one’s sleep patterns.
“We talk about this quite a bit when trying to help a patient sleep better. We do an assessment of what their issues are with sleep. Some people are sleeping excessively and they may be doing that to avoid other things. They may be sleeping excessively because of a medical problem that has gone undiagnosed. Other patients we find are falling asleep and not able to stay asleep or we’re finding they are falling asleep but waking up several hours later or just waking up multiple times in the middle of the night and unable to get back to sleep. One thing our program therapist does is a relaxation and breathing techniques to help them and because they do it every single day it comes like routine memory and then encourages to use those activities toward the end of the day as they getting ready to unwind and get some rest.”
The Senior Life Solutions Program is dedicated to improving the quality of life for the patients they serve. If you would like more information or would like to discuss support for yourself or a loved one feel free to contact the program at 308-836-2153.
