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Looking for a sleep apnea cure in Illinois? There are many remedies, some that work, some that do not. Read on to learn about the effects of losing sleep and what can be done about it.

What Happens When You Don’t Get Enough Sleep?

Missing one night’s sleep is not that bad for your body. If you are giving a speech the next morning, starting a new job, catching a plane, or starting a vacation, it is only natural to have difficulty sleeping the night before, but the excitement of the next day’s activities almost always counteracts any effects of the loss of sleep.

The main effect of a poor night’s sleep, or even two or three, is that you just get very sleepy. You also lose motivation for doing work or anything else but sleeping; it is difficult to pay attention to tasks, especially if they are boring; and your reaction time is somewhat slowed. Monotonous activities such as driving can be risky. So there are some effects, but they usually aren’t critical.

When looking for a sleep apnea cure in Illinois you should know that for most jobs, performance is not affected by one night’s lost sleep. However, making crucial judgments or doing creative thinking can be more difficult, and if a job is extremely boring, there is a decrease in performance even after the loss of just two hours of sleep on one night. Dr. Robert Wilkinson, of Cambridge, England, showed this by working with army recruits. He had them do some very boring work-such as crossing out the letter A in a series of words-for many hours a day after losing different amounts of sleep. Even a loss of only two hours of sleep had an effect. But most of our tasks aren’t so boring and, especially in an emergency, adrenaline keeps us going efficiently the next day and makes UD for lost sleep.

If you are forced to engage in an activity such as driving after sleep deprivation, you are in much more danger than usual because you are not as attentive or as careful in your judgment, and you might doze off.

When spending an entirely sleepless night-because of an emergency, for example-we may feel most sleepy around the “trough” of the 24-hour cycle, around 4 or 5 in the morning. Then, if we continue to stay awake, we usually get a second wind at about 8, 9, or 10 in the morning and function relatively well again during that day.

Missing sleep on a chronic basis may be a different story. After several nights without sleep, performance does go down, and you have more trouble concentrating and remembering numbers.

If you are an insomniac, there are three insomnia solutions you can do right away that will help you. No matter what other factors might be causing your poor sleep, you can do these things immediately and have an excellent chance of helping your sleep.

The three things: Reduce caffeine, limit alcohol, and eliminate smoking.

We know how difficult this can be, so we are not going to insist that everyone do it. Instead, we want you to investigate for yourself the effects of these three things on you.

In this article we will focus on reducing caffeine.

Insomnia Solutions: Reduce Caffeine

Research presented at the 1995 meeting of the Association of Professional Sleep Societies by Dr. Michael Bonnet, a researcher with the Dayton VA Hospital in Ohio, indicates that patients with insomnia typically have a 9 percent higher metabolic rate during both day and night than people who do not have insomnia.

Even though many insomniac patients feel lethargic and slowed down, their bodies act as if they are “hyped up.” When the metabolism of normal sleepers is increased to the same level by their drinking about four cups of normal coffee, the normal sleepers too experience insomnia. The message-most patients with insomnia are hyper aroused anyway, and adding coffee makes this condition worse. (Paradoxically, hyperactive children are often helped by caffeine.)

Caffeine and similar stimulants can cause many more problems than most people realize, and too much caffeine may be a factor in your insomnia. Often, insomniacs are so exceptionally sensitive to this stimulant that they may be unable to sleep after one cup of tea or a chocolate bar in the afternoon.

One study showed that patients who had caffeine-induced wakefulness cleared caffeine more slowly from their bodies. The concentration of caffeine in their blood was higher at midnight- eight hours after afternoon coffee-than it was in other people. Also, sensitivity to caffeine can increase with age. Even if you have had coffee, tea, or cola drinks in late afternoon or in the evening in the past with no trouble, they can start contributing to poor sleep as you get older.

Consuming more than 200 mg of caffeine a day (two cups of coffee, two or three colas, or several caffeine-containing pain tablets) is likely to affect sleep and create the danger of caffeine addiction. In some people, it takes much less–one cup of coffee at lunch or one cola in the afternoon.

So surefire insomnia solutions include reducing caffeine intake.