There are two kinds of sleep, and the question you need to ask yourself is: which kind are you getting? One kind of sleep involves closing your eyes at night, maybe rolling around at night, waking up in the morning, and feeling like you could have slept another 3 hours. Another kind of sleep involves falling asleep, sleeping deeply, and waking up feeling mostly or completely refreshed. Which one sounds familiar to you?
If you wake up feeling like you hardly slept, even if you slept all night, it’s going to inhibit your ability to enjoy life – you’re going to be tired all the time. When you are tired all the time, you are crabbier, perform worse in nearly every task, lose motivation to do things for yourself or with others, have reduced sex drive, and on and on. Life is simply less full when you have chronic fatigue.
It’s frustrating because you feel like you should be rested and happy because you've had a full night's sleep. This phenomenon is generally a strong symptom of either of the following:
There are some relatively common medical conditions that can make you tired all the time, even though you are getting 8 or more hours of sleep. These include:
These medical conditions can leave you feeling drained of energy, enthusiasm, and make you feel like you could “sleep a year.” With such conditions, you might range from feeling chronically fatigued, to feeling like you happily put your head down and sleep at any time, to being so disruptive you can hardly function normally.
One of the more common reasons you are tired all the time even after 8 hours of sleep is that you have a sleep disorder. Sleep disorders are conditions that prevent you from getting quality sleep. Here are a few sleep disorders that would give you illusion of sleeping throughout the night, but actually don’t provide quality sleep.
Fortunately, sleep apnea is usually treated 100% with CPAP therapy, using a CPAP machine as shown in the picture above.
Another set of sleep disorders that will leave you feeling tired after a full night’s sleep are parasomnias. Parasomnias are disruptive sleep disorders that interfere with your circadian rhythm, and may impact sleep quality without your awareness of it. They include the following disorders:
Finally, there are numerous lifestyle and emotional related causes of being sleep deprived from lack of sleep quality. Some of the more obvious ones are
Sleep deprivation despite good length of sleeping isn’t always the product of a sleeping disorder. Your sleep quality might also be impacted by:
Any of the above can cause you to get less quality sleep even though you are getting the right amount of sleep time.
If you are living in Anchorage and struggle with chronic fatigue or tiredness during the daytime, contact us. We can help.