Quite often we have people at our naturopathic clinic who come in to be treated for insomnia or restless sleep.

What causes sudden insomnia and restless sleep?

Stress is a huge factor for most people. Especially for those individuals who tend to take work stress home, have a hard time managing stress, and tend to internalize it. In doing so, when they try to get to sleep, all the thoughts that weren’t dealt with during the day, come up at night and disturb the individual sleep – where they might have a very active and restless mind and cant stop thinking when they should have been sleeping.

A simple solution to this would be to try and journal all your thoughts before bedtime in your library or study area or any area away from the bedroom.

You could also try some form of deep breathing or mediation before bedtime to help you calm your mind and body down. Physical exercise during the day is also great for stress relief. Acupuncture and relaxation is what we found to be the most effective, along with certain supplements for sleeping ailments that are stress related.

A deficiency in certain key nutrients may also cause restlessness during sleeping hours, talk to your naturopath about perhaps checking your nutrient status, especially if you are using stimulants such as coffee to get you through the day.  You might also want to get your cortisol levels checked (a key hormone that allows the body to adapt to stress), especially if you are getting a second wind at night or are rather alert when you wake up in the middle of the night. Usually saliva hormone testing is the best way to check the cortisol levels. Talk to our Toronto naturopath to see if this would be applicable in your case.

By: Sushma Shah, Toronto Naturopathic Doctor, at Nature’s Intentions Naturopathic Clinic.