Sleep disorders can plague women more often than men
Shelley Conner slept well until she hit 41 and began waking up 12 or 13 times in the night. "My boyfriend started to notice I would often quit breathing in the night," the Calgary homemaker says. She would partially wake up, gasping for air, sometimes getting out of bed, sometimes falling right back asleep.
The problem persisted for months, and Shelley grew less and less functional in the day. "I felt like a wet noodle," she says. She couldn't concentrate and was struck with sudden crying spells precipitated by fatigue and frustration. She was let go from her part-time job, though she's not certain if her sleep-deprived performance was the cause. "I was a basket case." Somehow a whole year passed in a blur before Shelley sought help from a sleep clinic.
While researchers are rapidly discovering new sleep disorders, they're also uncovering a series of unexpected and unhealthy side-effects: high blood pressure, depression, obesity, type 2 diabetes and breast cancer.
Surprisingly, evidence suggests women may be at greater risk for some of these consequences of a lack of shut-eye. And given growing recognition that women are more susceptible to certain sleep disorders -- for reasons not fully understood, although menopause is believed to play a major role -- clearly, more is at stake in getting a good's night sleep than just beauty rest.
What constitutes a healthy sleep?
"An ideal sleep is eight hours in bed, and 85 per cent of that time is asleep," says Dr. Marcel Baltzan, a physician specializing in sleep disorders at Mount Sinai Hospital in Montreal.
During a healthy sleep, you cycle through a four-stage process about four times a night. Briefly, stage N1 is a form of light sleep. Your eyes droop or close, and you may hear conversation or activity in the room. "Your brain waves slow, and some people feel they see a dream-like world," says Baltzan. Your muscles relax and your pulse slows and becomes more regular, as does your breathing. ("When we are awake, these functions are more irregular as they react to activities," explains Baltzan.)
N2 is a deeper, unconscious sleep, the calm, deep stage most of us are in for the majority of the time we sleep. Your muscles relax further, digestion slows down and becomes more regular, and your kidneys slow the production of urine.
N3 is a very deep sleep, the kind that is hard to wake up from, and the slowing down of function continues. And the final stage of sleep is R (formerly known as REM) sleep, when we experience dream sleep with complex imagery. Here, irregularity in eye movement, breathing and heart rate tends to recur because certain parts of the brain become more active while others become inhibited.
Click to continue and learn what happens to our bodies when we are sleep deprived...
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