Key Fats
- Over 30% of adults in the USA have insufficient sleeping time.
- Average sleeping time is less than 6 hours increases the risk of death by 13%.
- Pregnancy insomnia is common and is mainly caused by hormonal changes and frequent urination due to bladder compression.
- Tracking sleep duration and quality can help improve insomnia issues.
Sleep disorders bother 50 to 70 million individuals approximately in America, and over 30% of adults in the USA get insufficient sleeping time, with irregular sleep routines. Sleep is critical for maintaining good health. Insufficient sleep can negatively impact your ability to concentrate, learn, and memory, as well as your physical well-being. According to the National Institute of Health, 10%-30% of the world's population suffers from insomnia, defined as persistent difficulty falling asleep and the inability to fall back asleep.
What is Pregnancy Insomnia?
1. Causes
Pregnancy is one of the most common causes of insomnia, the changes in your body during pregnancy, with significant fluctuations in progesterone, luteinizing hormone, and some other important estrogens can cause pregnancy insomnia, which is as common as every 4 pregnant women have 1 is suffering from insomnia in the first 3 month of pregnancy, and as many as 80% moms-to-be will suffer from insomnia in late pregnancy.
2. Treatment
The fastest way to improve insomnia during pregnancy is adjusting your sleeping position. Physical changes in your body cause the original sleeping habits to become uncomfortable thus leading to insomnia during pregnancy. Therefore, the right pregnancy sleeping position not only improves insomnia but also prevents pressure on vital organs such as the liver.
Sleep Better During Pregnancy
Pregnancy insomnia can hurt both mom and baby, especially when medications that help you sleep are limited due to pregnancy. However, some natural sleep aids enable you to gain high-quality and peaceful sleep.
1. Best Pregnancy Sleeping Positions
Most experts recommend sleeping on the left side with bent knees when the abdomen begins to swell, it is comfortable, and also boosts blood circulation of both the mother and the fetus.
As the fetus grows, there is a greater likelihood that blood flow to the uterus will be compressed. Sleeping on the left side optimizes blood flow to the inferior vena cava (IVC). This major vein runs parallel to the right side of the spine and carries blood to the heart and, in turn, to the baby. Sleeping on the left side also reduces pressure on the liver and kidneys, relieving swelling in the hands, ankles, and feet.
Right-side lying puts pressure on the liver, so it's not the best choice. However, experts generally agree that it is safe to lie on the right side for short periods.
2. Natural Sleep Remedies
- Stop brain activities one hour before bedtime, avoid watching stimulating movies and novels, and try to keep calm.
- Try to keep exercising for 20-30 minutes a day.
- Green noise and hot baths relax the mind and body.
- Establishing a reasonable biological routine matters the most.
How Sleep Cycles Affect Health?
1. Why We Sleep?
Human sleeping is a part of the neural activity of the brain and is the result of inhibition after continued excitation of nerve cells in the cerebral cortex. When inhibition prevails in the cerebral cortex, you will sleep. You need work and rest in your daily life, the same as your neural activity. Inhibition is to protect the nerve cells so that they can re-excite and allow us to come and continue to work.
Sleeping is also a metabolic process within the body. Aging cells feed the arrangement used for each memory into new cells for storage during sleep, contributing to the body’s regulation.
Additionally, sleep helps with energy restoration and recovery. Studies indicate that the brain reinforces new memories and activates neural networks to categorize memories during sleep.
So sleep less than 6 hours on average, which is insufficient compared with standard sleep time, can weaken your body’s immunity and higher the death risk. There are about 15 major diseases that lead to death and 7 of them are related to insomnia, including cardiovascular diseases, malignant tumors, cerebrovascular diseases, accidents, diabetes, sepsis, and hypertension.
2. Side Effects of Insomnia Medications
People with severe insomnia will choose to utilize sleeping pills for relief, but improper quantity or long-time usage will result in unresponsiveness.
Sleeping pills have adverse effects on the human reproductive system and sexual function. Men who in long-term use experience decreases in libido and sexual dysfunction, while women may suffer from irregular menstruation and ovulation disruption.
Taking it in the early stages of pregnancy may cause congenital malformations in the fetus, and taking it during labor will affect the thermoregulation of the newborn, prolong its physiological jaundice period, and may even cause hyperbilirubinemia.
Experts recommend that patients suffering from severe emphysema should avoid sleeping pills due to their effect of inhibiting the respiratory center, which most emphysema patients are already respiratory insufficiency. Sleeping pills aggravate hypoxia and carbon dioxide retention.
Sleep Cycle Calculator
Our sleep is roughly divided into 4 stages: non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, comprising NREM1 and NREM2, then enter into NREM3 stage, the deeper sleep, and then REM, the stage where we dream. Adequate sleep time is enough to go through these four stages. Products such as smart rings can also monitor sleep duration and sleep stages to review the quality of your sleep, and the body indicators during sleep to monitor your health.
Image source: sleepfoundation
We suggest you take control of your health by combining sleep health and reproductive health so you can better regulate your body.
1. Femtometer Smart Ring for Women
Femometer Smart Ring is a wearable ovulation tracker, besides ovulation monitoring, it monitors your sleep duration and sleep stages, scoring your sleep performance and can be checked on the Femometer App, 90 points or more means you had a high quality sleep, less than 60 points indicates that you need to focus on your sleep health, to determine whether you need to manually intervene on sleep such as seek medical advice, use sleep medications, or improve your sleep environment through the basal body temperature(BBT), ovulation, menstruation and other aspects of the data.
Femometer launched the world's first smart ring designed specifically for women in 2023, with up to 90% accuracy in ovulation prediction. All predictions are based on constant monitoring of your BBT and a long-term record of your period performance, and its easy-to-wear design frees you from the discomfort of wearing a smartwatch to sleep or using a thermometer to track your basal body temperature. Simply slip it on your finger before bed and let it read your body data. The smart ring will continuously monitor your basal body temperature (BBT) without any manual input.
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2. Tracking Activities During Sleep
Snoring, teeth grinding, night sweats, and some other frequent activities during sleep can also affect your sleep quality, snoring reflects breathing problems, and individuals who snore heavily sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall asleep again.
Teeth grinding during sleep is a result of a variety of factors such as disorders of the orofacial system and stress, severe teeth grinding can prevent the chewing muscles from resting during sleep, leading to insomnia.
Some apps are now available to monitor the body's activity during sleep, which can be used to determine whether you have habits like teeth grinding, snoring, and other sleep-disturbing, and make improvements to your sleep quality.
Conclusion
Sleep during pregnancy is critical to both the mother's health and the development of the fetus. Adopting the right pregnancy sleeping positions can protect the liver from being squeezed while helping the mom-to-be improve her pregnancy sleep. Moms can also monitor their sleep and reproductive health during pregnancy through wearables such as smart rings. Monitoring behaviors such as snoring and teeth grinding during sleep can also help you intervene early to improve the quality of your sleep.
Sleep is vital to health, especially for women who need to prepare for and are pregnant, and adequate and quality sleep is the foundation of everything, so hopefully, modern technology like smart wearables can help all women guard their health.
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