We've looked at sleep diaries of patients with insomnia, and they'll say that they don't sleep for one or two days. And the body actually has a natural function, after about the third day to start catching up and you get a little bit more sleep the third night. And that's usually what I tell my patients.
Shelby HarrisNow circadian rhythms become very interesting and problematic for patients because when you become a teenager, your rhythms actually tend to naturally shift.
Shelby HarrisSo when it comes to circadian rhythms, it's a clock that's basically programmed in our body. So if you think back to times when people lived on farms and we didn't have electricity.
Shelby HarrisPeople tend to remember their dreams in the morning a little bit better and if earlier in the night, when you're in a lot of deep sleep, if someone wakes you, or the phone rings or something, you're really confused.
Shelby HarrisSo if somebody has chronic pain, we want to manage the pain, but we still want to treat the insomnia separately. So what we'll tend to do in our sleep lab is we'll do a thorough evaluation and we usually have myself, who is a Psychologist and a Sleep Behavioral Sleep Specialist, I treat the patients first.
Shelby HarrisNightmares are distinctly different from dreams in the way that people feel them and experience them. So a lot of people think that a nightmare is something where something is chasing them and you have to wake up screaming. Yes, that's one of the more common nightmares that we see is the person chasing someone or they're being chased.
Shelby Harris