Multiple symptoms and complications of diabetes may be affecting your nightly rest!
Nearly half of those with diabetes complain about difficulty sleeping or getting a poor quality of sleep. While our fast-paced lifestyles can cause some insomnia, the truth is, diabetes can have a more significant impact on your quality of sleep than you think. In fact, there may be many more diabetics who experience issues with their nightly rest and don’t realize it is an actual problem.
How Diabetes Causes Insomnia
Multiple symptoms of diabetes can interfere with your ability to get to sleep at night. Frequent visits to the bathroom are one of them. When your blood sugar levels are elevated, your body will try to remove some of the excess glucose through urine. This means you may be getting up multiple times a night to go to the bathroom.
Of course, waking up often is going to impede your ability to reach the deepest stages of sleep that are necessary to feel well and fully rested.
Some research also indicates that going without sleep can also lower your insulin sensitivity and make you hungrier during the day. If you don’t control your cravings, you may end up with high blood sugar the next night and have the same issues all over again.
Diabetic Neuropathy
You may also have neuropathy, which is nerve damage that can lead to pain, numbness, and tingling in the limbs. These kinds of sensations can be distracting for those trying to get to sleep at night!
Sleep Apnea
Another worrisome problem that interferes with rest is sleep apnea. Diabetics who are overweight can also develop this condition, which is the result of excess fat compressing the airways. It can cause you to stop breathing for short periods of time in your sleep and trigger you to wake up. Those with sleep apnea may not even be awake long enough to realize what’s happened and simply fall back to sleep within moments. Thankfully, there is a sleep mask that patients can wear at night to keep their airways open and improve the quality of their rest.
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[expand title=”References“]
13 Best Sleep Tips. URL Link. Accessed October 24th, 2017.
The Sleep-Diabetes Connection. URL Link. Accessed October 24th, 2017.
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