Q: Our adult son has a sleep disorder and seldom gets a good night’s sleep. What are his options besides sleeping pills?
A: Instead of looking at sleep disorders as problems, we can best understand them as adaptations to life’s circumstances.
Coyote pups go into a sleep-like state when their parents are away from the den to draw as little attention to themselves as possible.
In the same way, the hypervigilance of the sleep disorder may protect your son and others from what might be perceived as surprise attacks from an intruder. If you look at it this way, the sleep disorder is not a problem. It is an adaptation.
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Sleep disorders are drawn from medical problems. Those struggling with sleep apnea wake frequently during the night to counter suffocating respiratory challenges. For your son, what this means is that before he does anything for his sleep disorder he should check in with his family doctor to determine how much of this is a medical problem and if so, what can be done about it.
The other probability is that your son’s sleep disorder is drawn from a non-medical problem.
Look at today’s world. We have a ridiculous war in Ukraine flirting with nuclear conflict, totally unpredictable chaos permeating climate change and an inability for our governing bodies to manage the crisis in the grocery store.
Your son may not consciously think on these or other significant events but the events permeate his neurological structure and at night, when all else is quiet, that little schism in his unconscious being strikes fear into his heart and keeps everything on red alert, just in case something happens.
Never think that your son is alone in this. One of our guesstimates is that one in three people worldwide has had symptoms of insomnia.
There are no quick fixes for sleep disorder. Even sleeping pills are magical for only short periods of time. But if your son admits to the terror of the war, the fear of the climate and the distress of the grocery bill, he might find better ways to adapt to the challenges.
Refining adaptations is going to take time but it just might work in the long run. I do not know of a better way to resolve those sleepless nights.
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan. Contact: jandrews@producer.com.
