Being tired all of the time can make it difficult to enjoy life. You feel crabby around your family, children, and loved ones. You can’t perform at school at work. You lose your drive to spend time with friends. You might struggle with erectile dysfunction (for men) and/or reduced sex drive. Small tasks become a big deal. The list goes on and on, but the important thing is that sleep deprivation impacts nearly every aspect of your life.
What's even more frustrating is when you feel like this even after getting a full 8 hours of sleep. That seems counterintuitive. If you are getting 8 hours of sleep, then you are likely doing many of things you are supposed to in order to feel rested.
But here’s the thing, there are conditions that will give the illusion of a proper, full night’s rest without actually providing quality sleep needed, and generally fall into these categories:
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.
When you stop breathing, you momentarily wake up to begin breathing again (though you won’t remember waking). Therefore, you might sleep from 9pm to 7am and still feel like you barely slept – because you really didn’t sleep! It causes severe sleep deprivation because you are constantly being awakened, thereby preventing any restful sleep from happening.
Here are common symptoms:
Parasomnias are disruptive sleep disorders that interfere with your circadian rhythm, and may impact sleep quality without your awareness of it. You might compare this to, say, insomnia where you are acutely aware of your lack of sleep.
Common parasomnias include:
Sleep deprivation despite a sufficient amount of time 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.
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.
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:
If you are living in Anchorage and struggle with chronic fatigue or tiredness during the daytime, contact us. We can help.