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Now narcolepsy is really hard though because they're very tired during the day, they're sleepy during the day and it's managed mostly with medications. So we use medications to help them sleep better at night and to stay away during the day. But there are behavioral things you can do also by changing diet, exercise, having an actual nap schedule.

Shelby Harris

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Shelby Harris
Age: 33
Born: 1991
Born: August 11
American Football Player
Football Player
Milwaukee City
Wisconsin
Away
Tired
Schedule
Night
Exercise
Schedules
Also
Stay
Managed
Narcolepsy
Better
Sleep
Diet
Medications
Hard
Though
Diets
Behavioral
Really
Help
Mostly
Naps
Things
Use
Actual
Sleepy
Helping
Changing
Medication

More quotes by Shelby Harris

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Night terrors are very different from nightmares. A lot of people will think they're the same, but they're really not. Night terrors - you want to look at the time of night when you're having the problem. Night Terrors happen in deep sleep. Nightmares tend to happen in a lighter REM sleep.
Shelby Harris
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There are some people who believe that dreams really are just kind of a throwaway thing. They are just a way of your brain processing what's happening during the day, but there's really no meaning to them a lot of imagery of just flashes of what happened.
Shelby Harris
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So, sleep deprivation, and sometimes an insomnia, which is a little bit of a different form, but just getting a lack of sleep, can lead to a number of different decrements.
Shelby Harris
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So 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 Harris
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There are people who have repetitive nightmares. And what happens is their brain is trying to process the stress and help their brain actually deal with what happens if this stress happens again, so their brain's preparing them to deal with it in case the stress happens again, but it's so scary that they awaken from it.
Shelby Harris
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I'll work on patient's thoughts about sleep, So I must get eight hours of sleep tonight or I won't sleep tomorrow. That sometimes - or I won't function tomorrow. That sometimes makes it very difficult for you to sleep at night
Shelby Harris
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There's a new line of research showing that people who don't get enough sleep, they're body doesn't metabolize as well. And so they actually - it leads to weight gain. So if you're not getting enough sleep, you might have difficulty losing weight.
Shelby Harris
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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 Harris
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So we go through in the beginning of the night, we go into the really deep stages of sleep and we actually cycle through. So, when you go down to the deep stage, then you go back up and you actually come into something called REM sleep, which is after about 90 minutes.
Shelby Harris
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People 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 Harris
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People went to bed when the sun went down and they woke up when the sun came up. That's what our bodies are naturally programmed to do. However, with all the new stresses in life with electricity, with technology, we tend to override that system and we'll stay up later and we'll get up earlier or later, and we use alarm clocks, we use the light.
Shelby Harris
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So a lot of people who work rotating shifts and they work at night, their bodies are set to want to be awake during the day and sleep at night. So there are some people who have a lot of trouble adjusting their rhythms and they have trouble working the night shift, they're sleepy, they're drowsy driving home.
Shelby Harris
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Nightmares 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
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If you're going somewhere East from here, generally what you want to do is you want to try to have your bed time earlier and earlier so what we'll do is I'll have someone adjust for a week or two by going to be 15 minutes earlier and getting up 15 minutes earlier every night. So that can be a really simple thing.
Shelby Harris
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There's some debate as to whether you need to awaken from them because there are some patients who are actually starting to say, I had these horrible nightmares, but I never woke up from them. But they can still recall them when they get up in the morning. So there's still some debate in the field.
Shelby Harris
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When it comes to the reason why we have nightmares, we're still debating that. It's a new area of research, nightmares. And the way I like to think about it is, our brain - we have stress during the day and our brain needs to learn to process this stress.
Shelby Harris
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So there's a few different ways that we treat insomnia. The first thing that we always do is we look at the cause.
Shelby Harris
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For some people they say, it's about wish fulfillment, it's about the things you are never able to do in your day you are actually fulfilling at night. There are other people who will say that it's actually telling you something.
Shelby Harris
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And you cycle throughout so that you do about five to six cycles throughout the night. And we spend more time in REM later on in the night than we do earlier on.
Shelby Harris
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We haven't really - it's harder for us to set those rhythms. So it's really important to keep a steady bedtime and wake time to really lock in those rhythms.
Shelby Harris