Drowsiness

Do you want to sleep all the time? Can not keep your eyes open? Can this be a terrible sleeping sickness?

Of course, if you live in the heart of Africa and you are bitten by one of these disgusting, disease-carrying tsetse flies. In the other case - forget about it! As you will see, there are several "states" that take energy away from you. But in real life most people have chronic drowsiness - psychological . Such people are bored, depressed or take some medicine with the side effect of sleepiness. How can you determine that your sleepiness does not go beyond the head?

Each of us can, of course, remember the time when we slept more than usual, just to avoid unpleasant or unnecessary responsibility . There is a good way to get rid of psychological stress - to fall asleep, on the basis of this it can be said that excessive sleep can be a way to escape from pressing problems and solve them. Sleep can also be a departure from boredom or stress .

The causes of drowsiness are not always, however, so obvious. The man we are about to tell the story about, headed a huge industrial campaign and was known for his inexhaustible energy. He was on his feet at four or five in the morning, worked, went to the office by seven and did not return home before eight in the evening. He never got tired. But one day something very unusual happened. He really looked sleepy at his desk. Colleagues even saw that he yawned several times! It happened again in a day or two and began to be repeated with an appalling frequency. In two or three weeks it was already impossible to count on the fact that he would be cheerful during the most lively business meeting. The man himself was, to put it mildly, in embarrassment and depressed. Maybe he does not sleep much? He began to go to bed earlier and earlier and wake up all later and later. He stopped working in the morning and started drinking a few cups of coffee at breakfast. It helped a little, but not enough. He still could not keep his eyes open for the day. The morning was his worst time. When all household remedies were tried and found unsatisfactory, the man went to see a doctor. He arrived at the appointed time (at five o'clock in the afternoon), and looked pretty good and not at all sleepy. The doctor asked him in detail, trying to find a physical or psychological explanation for his drowsiness. He's bored? Not at all. Did anything unpleasant happen in his life, from which he tried to escape? You are ridiculous! Was he depressed? Just because of my sleepiness. Then the doctor asked him: "What medications does he take: tranquilizers, antidepressants or sleeping pills? The patient agreed that in the past he had taken a very mild sleeping pill, but said he had never done it for weeks. In fact, the only cure (if I can call it that), which he took regularly, were two multivitamin tablets during breakfast, and no one had ever fallen asleep from them.

The clinic began a thorough and complete examination. Nothing found! He's in great shape! A series of blood tests also showed no anemia, no kidney, liver, or a diminished thyroid function (each of them can cause drowsiness). Everything was fine. Reception from a neurologist who in turn prescribed a tomogram of the brain also showed nothing. Nowhere are any problems. What could it be? The next step is a psychiatric examination. However, on the eve of everything opened. You'll never guess what made this man so drowsy!

Here's how it happened.

One day, having breakfast with his wife, the patient drank his orange juice and a couple of sandwiches. He reached out for the vitamins that were in one of the plastic containers supplied by the pharmacologists (a label on one was missing). He put two capsules on the table and poured a second cup of strong coffee.

His wife looked at the vitamins. "What are you taking, dear?" She asked.

"My vitamins, without them, probably, I would not have survived."

She looked puzzled. "Darling," she said, "these vitamins are terribly similar to your sleeping pills."

The rest you can guess. Apparently, this man accidentally changed the vials and for many weeks took two sleeping pills every morning at breakfast! They were almost identical in size, shape and color with its vitamins!

A lot of drugs , most of which are tranquilizers , can make you drowsy. Sleeping pills of long duration will provide you with this condition the next day. The same effect can have antihistamines , contained in many drugs from cough and cold. These antihistamines are in fact so powerful soothing that they are the main ingredients of many over-the-counter sleeping pills. It's one thing to use them to provide a night's sleep, but different if you take them every four hours because of some allergy: you will want to sleep throughout the day. Such beta-blockers , as indial and tenormin (there are others), will also make you sleepy.

When you eliminate boredom, depression and medication as the cause of your drowsiness, here are a few diseases that you need to consider.

The disorder most often accompanied by chronic drowsiness is a decreased function of the thyroid gland . If you are also constipated, overweight, you lose hair (and they become coarse), you are always cold and you feel tired (no matter how much you sleep), your thyroid gland needs pumping. If you have a lot of excess weight and notice for yourself that you fall asleep at any time - unpredictably, even standing up, and for a long time. Doctors call this disease obesity syndrome and hypoventilation . Normal breathing depends on a sufficient amount of carbon dioxide to stimulate the respiratory center in the brain. Drowsiness in this state is the result of a lack of carbon dioxide. Very fat people work a little with the diaphragm, so the flow of air into the lungs and of them is reduced. The resulting low level of carbon dioxide in the blood is almost narcotic in its effect on the respiratory center of the brain.

Obese people may also suffer from respiratory arrest , sleep apnea , which is most common in men 50 years and older, who are overweight and snore. Their breathing at night is irregular, with periods of 10 seconds to a minute and longer, during which they do not breathe at all. They wake up hundreds of times a night without realizing it, so they are drowsy the next day. They also suffer from impotence and high blood pressure.

If your teenage son falls into a deep sleep after a meal, consider the possibility of Kline-Levin syndrome , a fairly rare hormonal disorder that affects adolescent boys.

If you got a head injury shortly before you became drowsy, you may have hurt yourself more than you think, and you have a subdural hematoma (a cluster of blood under your skull that squeezes your brain). It can also cause drowsiness.

If, along with drowsiness, you have headaches, vision deteriorated, there is weakness in the hands or feet and you notice some difficulty speaking, and dizziness, possibly a stroke or a brain tumor . Visit the doctor.

The need to lie down at any time can be a part of any illness that depletes you - liver disease, kidney disease , far-reaching cancer , any infection, even a common cold . Men with prostate disorders who have to get up every night or every hour to empty the bladder, often feel exhausted the next day. The same is observed in asthmatics and people with heart failure , which is difficult to breathe at night, and we will not forget the unhappy, dividing bedrooms with "melodic" snoring.

There is a sleep disorder called narcolepsy , in which uncontrolled and unpredictable bouts of drowsiness are observed, which have nothing to do with a sense of fatigue. Narcoleptics suddenly fall asleep for a few minutes, almost without warning. Then they wake up dramatically, as if nothing happened, and / or do not have seizures for days and weeks, or have the next few minutes. The dream itself is quite normal, it looks natural, from it they can be withdrawn as easily as any other just snoozing.

It all sounds pretty innocuous, does not it? In the end, what's wrong with that, refreshing a long sleep during the day? The difference is that healthy people plan their sleep, get ready for it and are accordingly immersed. Narcoleptic does not ponder anything and does not anticipate. He falls asleep at any place at any time - driving a car, sawing wood, going downstairs, even making love.

Narcolepsy can be recognized and distinguished from normal sleep by accompanying symptoms. For a short period, seconds or minutes, just before they go to sleep or immediately after awakening, patients experience a paralysis of the legs or hands, so that they drop what they carry, or they suddenly fall to the ground. This loss of strength is temporary, and muscle strength is soon completely restored. Some people with narcolepsy also see, hear or smell, which they do not see, hear or feel before or after the attack.

The cause of narcolepsy is unknown. Between seizures, these people are perfectly healthy, and all tests are normal. Fortunately, a medicine called Ritalin effectively controls the symptoms of this strange disease.

So, if it's hard for you to stay awake, while everyone around you is fussy, full of energy, ask yourself if you are not overwhelmed . Then check your medications , each one. In addition, the cause can lie in any disease - from anemia to a decreased function of the thyroid gland and narcolepsy . But you do not need to "just live" with this, because you do not have anything to hurt. Visit a doctor. He may be able to give a new start to your life.

Symptom: excessive drowsiness