Sleeping disorders affect an estimated 30 million Americans. Studies also show that disorders are caused by factors including extreme fatigue.
A recent study conducted by Stanford University found that 7.6 percent of Americans suffer from chronic morning headaches.
The study revealed that things associated with the headaches included: anxiety, depression, insomnia, sleep-related breathing disorder, hypertension, circadian rhythm disorder, musculoskeletal diseases, the use of medication and alcohol consumption.
“Because sleep disturbance of any kind, especially insomnia, disrupts physical functioning to some extent, the risk of any health problem increases at least a little with a chronic sleep problem,” psychology professor Kristine Jacquin said.
Jacquin said some people who use alcohol or sedatives to go to sleep might experience morning headaches as a withdrawal effect of the substance. She also said using alcohol or sedatives reduces the quality of sleep even.
The risk of morning headaches increases once sleep has been disturbed in any way, but sleep disturbance can be related to other problems, Jacquin said.
Sleep disturbance can also be related to depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders and schizophrenia.
“Sleep disturbance is one of the symptoms of depression,” Jacquin said. “Interestingly, depressed people who chronically sleep too much are more likely to feel worse.”
“Sleep is something we always ask about in people who we think could be depressed,” counseling psychologist Phillip Drumheller said. “Different people are affected by depression in different ways.”
Drumheller explained that some people suffering from depression will oversleep because they feel they need more sleep. Some individuals under-sleep because they cannot fall asleep, and some wake up earlier than they normally do.
Jacquin said mild sleep deprivation can cause problems such irritability, headaches, concentration and difficulty learning and retaining information. Severe sleep deprivation, she said, can become so serious that it causes psychotic problems, she added.
“Many times, people experience these negative effects after missing only a few hours of sleep each night, but they do not feel that they perform any differently,” Jacquin said.
People who have been awake for 19 hours scored significantly worse on performance tests and alertness scales than people with a blood alcohol level of .08, which is considered legally drunk according to the National Sleep Foundation Web site.
“When I have stayed up all night long, I am very hyper the next day,” said Jessica Lovelady, a first-year architecture student. “A lot of the time I have problems with my vision because of all-nighters, and when I do crash-it’s hard.”
Although the amount of sleep varies from person to person, adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep each night.
“To find out how much sleep you need, go to bed at the same time every night for a week, and sleep until you wake up each day,” Jacquin said.
She said that by averaging the amount slept each night, one could determine how much sleep they should get each night.