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How Not To Lose Sleep Over Hypertension

The part of the nervous system in vertebrates controlling involuntary actions of the smooth muscles, the heart and the glands is called the autonomic nervous system. Sleep alters its functions and initiates certain physiological events important for normal functioning of the body. When there’s a lack of sleep, one of the outcomes is high blood pressure. This worsens the sleep cycle furthermore but let’s take things one at a time. We’ll start with nocturnal blood pressure (BP).

Sleep, or normal sleep makes blood pressure dip. Nocturnal dipping is between 10% and 20% (both in systolic and diastolic) compared to daytime. When blood pressure drops less than 10%, it is considered abnormal. It indicates an increased cardiovascular risk which translates to an approximately 20% greater risk in mortality. The reasons can be the development of chronic kidney diseases and diabetes due to the high blood pressure and may give rise to resistant hypertension, which is: you have grown tolerance to at least three optimally-dosed medications and not being able to keep your blood pressure under control. The other risk is OSA (obstructive sleep apnea, or… snoring), which occurs when you get to breathe less than you need while asleep.

Sleep Duration and Hypertension Statistics

Following are important statistics about how sleep patterns have changed over the years and is having an increasing impact on our day to day lives.

Habitual sleep duration has reduced by 2 hours everyday over the past 50 years.
More than 30% Americans sleeps less than 6 hours every night on an average.
Sleeping ≤ 5 hours/night doubles the chances for prevalent hypertension by as much as 95% among people above 58 years of age.
Long sleep durations (more than 9 hours) reduces the chances of prevalent hypertension by almost 50%.
Lack of sleep doesn’t affect the 70+ years crowd as much as the middle-aged.

When high blood pressure doesn’t let you sleep

Really? But we thought it’s a lack of sleep that brings high BP. Yes, but also the other way round and that’s what we are actually interested in. It’s chiefly the BP medications that interfere with the sleep patterns; for example, Alpha-blockers (Uroxatral, Cardura, Minipress, Rapaflo etc.) cuts down REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. In case of Beta-blockers like Tenormin and Coreg, they often bring nighttime awakenings and nightmares by blocking melatonin. Over a long span, they can start chronic insomnia.

Those on ACE-inhibitors (Lotensin, Capoten, Vasotec) also run a risk of losing their sleep since these medications cause a hacking, dry cough. These also increases potassium levels in the body and can lead to diarrhea, leg cramps and body ache; all these add up to sleepless nights. Please ask your doctor if you can change into a safer benzothiazepine calcium channel blockers. If you are above 65 years, medicines like Avodart or Proscar shall prove better. Additionally, you must also try sublingual (under-the-tongue) doses of vitaminB12 (1,000 mcg daily) and B6 (200 mg daily) along with Folic acid (800 mcg daily).

Ways to lower blood pressure naturally

Wonders of Nature comes again to rescue! These herbs exhibit blood pressure lowering potential.

Garlic: A very effective herb also against hyperlipidemia (high cholesterol), it increases nitric oxide production and relaxes smooth muscles. Garlic decreases BP and lipid peroxidation only when it’s needed and not in healthy people. But it does increase levels of vitamins C and E, which are powerful antioxidants that repair you from within.
Prickly Custard apple: Use the leaf extract to decrease peripheral vascular resistance and lower an elevated BP.
Celery: Mix an equal amount of its juice and honey (8 ounces total) and take it orally, three times a day for one week. It will reduce both systolic and diastolic BP. With vinegar, it relieves dizziness, headaches and shoulder pain that often show up with BP.
Green Oat: Replaces antihypertensive medications effectively and improves BP control. However, don’t rush it; ask your doctor to guide you towards tapering down the dose of medications. Don’t worry, the oats shall fill in the place of the medications.

Gaining back a good night’s sleep by fighting hypertension is easier said than done. However, these recommendations will work better if combined with the methods and measures stated in the previous installments. Remember, Hypertension is more of a symptom and a sign of a disorder, not a disorder itself in most of the cases. Once you know how to eliminate the root cause, you cure a lot of other problems also that were troubling you all this time.

How Insomnia Impacts Your Health

In an earlier post we explained how sleeping issues have an impact on the people around us and society in general. But from a personal health standpoint, sleep disorders and chronic sleep loss are associated with: diabetes, heart diseases and high blood pressure. In fact, according to numerous studies, if you suffer from insomnia, a disorder characterized by trouble both falling and staying asleep—you have a 90 percent chance of also having a secondary health issue.

Insomnia, the natural fat

As an added bonus, lack of sleep can also make you fat—literally. Studies now show that too many sleepless nights can increase your appetite and hunger levels. A 2004 study revealed that people who get less than six hours sleep a night are close to 30 percent more likely to become obese than those who’ve slept even one hour more. The study showed that: “Shortened sleep time is associated with decreases in leptin and elevations in ghrelin,” the peptides that regulate appetite. So all of you late-night bingers, rest assured; there really is a reason for your insatiable 3 am hunger. And of course, this hunger isn’t for the food that is actually good for us. We crave fattening, high-carb snacks as we search the cupboards in our zombie-like states. Chips, candies, ice cream, chocolate… anything to fill that late night or early-morning hunger. Enough studies have now made this correlation that a recommendation for 7-9 hours sleep may be part of all weight loss regimes.

Deprivation causes Frustration

It also stands to reason that continued lack of sleep can lead to frustration and eventually depression. I get that. But apparently, insomniacs are actually five times more likely to develop depression than people who actually sleep. And this can easily become a vicious cycle: less sleep can heighten depression and deeper depression can cause more sleepless nights.

Another obvious effect of lack of sleep is that it can affect our sense of judgment. When you are exhausted, it becomes increasingly harder to see things clearly. Whether we believe we are functioning well or not, studies show that people who get even as much as 6 hours sleep perform worse on mental alertness and physical performance tests compared to people who get 7-9 hours of shut eye every night.

And for all of you women (and men) who are worried about the inevitable signs of aging, people who suffer from lack of sleep show just that, marked signs of aging such as sallow skin and puffy eyes even after just a few sleepless nights. For you chronic insomniacs, sleep loss can lead to those horrible dark circles under your eyes that even the best concealer can’t hide. Your skin will also lack that youthful luster, not to mention the growing number of fine lines and eventual deep wrinkles that seem to come out of nowhere. This is due in part to the stress hormone cortisol, which can break down your skin’s collagen that keeps your skin smooth and elastic.

Libido

Lack of sleep can be especially serious for younger people since too little sleep causes the body to release too little human growth hormone (HGH). As we get older, HGH helps to increase muscle mass, thicken the skin, and strengthen our bones. And this hormone is only released during deep sleep, a type of sleep insomniacs rarely get.

Another issue caused by lack of sleep is lowered libido. While this is easy to understand, when you’re exhausted, sleep is all you can think about, this will probably not bode well for your partner, or your ego for that matter, however.
While all of this is bad enough, if you are getting 5 or fewer hours of sleep a night, a 2007 study shows that you are twice as likely to die from cardiovascular disease. In fact, you have essentially doubled your risk of death from ALL causes. Yikes!