Hypersomnia: Understanding Excessive Sleepiness and How to Manage It

Hypersomnia, the condition which results in daytime dozing or drowsiness after sleep, creates a great hindrance when it comes to a person's school and work lifestyle and even in their social life. The most important sources of this sleep disorder in the UK are sleep disordered breathing and nervous system, such as sleep apnoea, narcolepsy, and various other disorders.

Other symptoms of hypersomnia include prolonged sleep with difficulties in waking up in the morning and irritability during the sleepy states and excessive sleepiness all the time. This has the effect that some people feel sleepy even after a reasonable amount of sleep, they even exhibit other symptoms like confusion, memory problem and mood swings.

Many individuals don't know that they are suffering from hypersomnia since tiredness seems normal to them. Sometimes, stimulating or wake-promoting drugs are used for counteracting daytime sleepiness in patients. In this blog, we will share a deep look at what is hypersomnia and everything else you need to know about the condition.

What Is Hypersomnia? A Deep Dive into Sleep Disorder

Hypersomnia is also known as excessive daytime sleepiness with difficulty in staying awake for daily activities, even with sufficient night sleeps. It disrupts everyday life, work, and general well-being. Sleepiness comes all day long even after a full rest at night and hampers concentration, memory, and mood even with proper resting hours.

Differentiating Hypersomnia from Normal Tiredness

Tiredness is, indeed, an "universal" concept of regular fatigue. It happens normally in most cases and lasts temporarily. When tiredness becomes too much, and seems to hamper your daily routine continuously then that is a case of hypersomnia. These two states vary as follows:

1. Duration and Consistency

• Normal Tiredness: It occurs after a long day's activity, if at all, after deprivation of sleep at a night. Normally, a person can recover from 'normal' tiredness after a night of good sleep. This type of tiredness lasts a few days at most.
• Hypersomnia: The Tiredness is constant for weeks, months, or even years. It hardly improves with a long sleep period, and even after a full night's rest, the person may feel uncontrollably sleepy.

Differentiating Hypersomnia from Other Sleep Issues

Hypersomnia sometimes resembles other sleep disorders, but the presentations are different.

1. Sleep Apnea Compared to Hypersomnia

• Sleep Apnea: sleep disordered breathing with frequent episodes of awakening and poor sleep quality, which renders a patient feeling excessively sleepy, not because of excess sleep time, but more in total sleep disruption.
• Hypersomnia: May sleep long hours, individual sleep patterns differ; but still suffer from severe daytime sleepiness. It may also have difficulty remaining awake when it should. Conditions like sleep apnea can be a cause of hypersomnia.

Primary vs. Secondary Hypersomnia: What’s the Difference?

Primary Hypersomnia: This category is not concerning any other condition with which one might associate. Idiopathic hypersomnia is the most common form, and patients may find themselves excessively sleepy without an apparent reason.

Secondary Hypersomnia: This category occurs as a symptom, symptoms being extremely varied of which these include:

• Sleep apnoea: A period of breathing cessation and resumption during sleep, restricted interrupted sleep, and excessive tiredness during daytime.
• Narcolepsy: Narcolepsy is a neurological condition exemplifying sudden daytime sexual activities that cannot be controlled by the affected individual.
• Depression: Depression is chiefly a domain of the mental disorder that causes insomnia or hypersomnia.
• Chronic Fatigue Condition: Involving prolonged fatigue that remains unrelieved by rest and during periods of hypersomnia.

Differentiating idiopathic hypersomnia from hypersomnias due to other medical or lifestyle factors.

So, we have understood hypersomnia, which is usually misapplied to mean daytime sleep. This creates a need on distinguishing cases like idiopathic hypersomnia separating from hypersomnias of other types of causative factors, such as medical or lifestyle factors.

The differences are discussed below:

Different types of hypersomnias can diagnose senomorphic hypersomnia. It has daytime sleepiness, which is completely undetermined. The term idiopathic, therefore, means that nobody knows how it starts- nobody knows what kind of underlying medical condition could have produced the symptoms. It is most frequently diagnosed after the ruling out of other causes.

Symptoms:

• Continuous daytime sleepiness even after a full night's sleep (7-9 hours generally)
• Long naps that are not refreshing can be one hour or more in duration.
• Waking up from sleep inertia comes with symptoms where mental energy levels appear to be decreased, as well as confusion or disorientation at the occurrence of awakening.

Management:

Management usually entails the use of medications to relieve the daytime sleepiness seen in these patients, such as modafinil and amphetamine-like drugs. Cognitive behavioral therapy schemes and improvements in sleep hygiene have also helped in certain cases.

2. Hypersomnia Resulting from Medical Or Lifestyle Causes:

Hypersomnia arising from some underlying medical condition or a lifestyle factor is generally a more obvious cause and can thus be easily treated or managed by addressing the root cause.

Medical Causes:

Some medical causes of hypersomnia include:

• Sleep Apnoea: A condition in which the person's airway is blocked at night so that, when breathing ceases and restarts repeatedly, the person awakens from sleep, as they, gets fragmented sleep along with the effect of daytime sleepiness despite having a full night's sleep.
• Narcolepsy: A disease occurring in the nervous system whereby the brain cannot efficiently regulate the sleep-wake cycle and result in sudden attacks of sleeping.
• Depression: Some people become hypersomniac, or extremely sleepy, and may suffer from depression. Hypersomnia depression refers to hypersomnia, which is hypersomnolence, owing to changes in brain chemicals.
• Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A disorder causing intense fatigue that does not get better with rest, and generally a patient would also have hypersomnia.
• Side Effects of Medication: Some drugs, for example, sedatives, antidepressants, or antihistamines, are reported to cause drowsiness besides being among the many available medications contributing to excessive sleepiness.
• Other Disorders: Obesity, hypothyroidism, and multiple sclerosis may all contribute to fatigue and excessive sleep.

Lifestyle factors

• Alcohol or Caffeine Use: With heavy use of alcohol or caffeine, especially in the evening, the sleep patterns can be disturbed with resultant excessive daytime sleepiness.
• Lack of Physical Activities: A lifestyle given to sedentary lifestyle results in poor quality of sleep and consequent fatigue.

Treatment:

In cases of hypersomnia arising from medical or lifestyle considerations, treatment is often concentrated on what is behind the hypersomnia. This may include:

• CPAP for sleep apnoea.
• A therapy or drug treatment for states similar to depression or anxiety.
• In this case, sleep hygiene and changes in lifestyle, exercise and routine sleep schedules- would help in hypersomnia.

Key Symptoms and Signs

Persistent daytime sleepiness

The characteristic feature of persistent daytime sleepiness is a compulsion to take a nap or sleep during the day, whether one has had a full night's sleep or not. This feeling of sleepiness and tiredness can occur regardless of how much rest you have had the last night.

Long nighttime sleep

You may have one-hour-long naps during the day, and even with sleep, you continue feeling tired when waking up.

Brain fog

There is no particular medical condition for brain fog. Rather, some cognitive processes - a group of symptoms, as it were - get together to form a unified symptom complex that collectively interferes with one's ability to think, focus on important things, and remember anything at all.

Irritability

Being grumpy refers to the condition of irritability in which a person gets annoyed, get raged, or infuriated because of minor things. The manifestation could be as short tempered or impatience, even leaving a person to feel on edge with those inconsequential events triggering the flare-up.

Common Causes and Risk Factors of Hypersomnia

• Sleep Apnoea: Snoring is the most common reason for excessive daytime sleepiness in Britain: it presents obstruction of the upper airways during sleep that produces pauses in breathing and results in the same sleep interruptions in apnoea episodes.
• Narcolepsy: Narcolepsy is defined as a condition resulting from an unshaped brain failing to organize itself in proper sleep-wake cycles. The episodes during which a subject experiences daytime sleep are often random, occurring without a moment's notice, as well as cataplexy: sudden loss of muscle strength resulting from sudden strong emotional effects.
• Depression: Commonly referred to as one of the most common condition of mental health in the UK, depression affects millions of individuals each year often leading to hypersomnia and other sleep problems.
• Substance Abuse: Alcohol, illegal drugs, recreational drugs, and prescription drugs: All such substances in the UK have adverse effects on both physical and mental health.
• Neurological Conditions: In this way, the UK market for neurological conditions becomes quite huge, with treatments now being more sought after due to an aging population and increasing awareness about such diseases.
• Poor Sleep Hygiene: Poor sleep habits in the UK, characterized by erratic sleep, screen overuse, poor diet, and high levels of stress, are thus turning into an increasing health-related concern.

Hyper-somnia's Effects on Mental Health.

Depression and Anxiety:

Individuals with hypersomnia could, in the long run, be affected by mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety. The constant drains of being tired often cause sympathies for the social and professional challenges of dealing with hypersomnia and the intensification of feelings of isolation and hopelessness.

Hypersomnia Effects at Work:

Threats to Safety: Hypersomnia poses a serious threat to safety where alertness is fundamental: driving heavy machinery or working in a health-care environment. Fatigue-based accidents and errors are more prone among these workers.

Impacts of Hypersomnia on Relationships:

Reduced Socialization: Hypersomnia makes one disconnect from social activities and move into solitude; one does not associate with one's family and friends due to lethargy or embarrassment from the illness.

Hypersomnia affects the overall quality of life:

Health Consequences: Untreated hypersomnia may give rise to certain health complications such as obesity, hypertension, or heart disease since these factors are predominantly sedentary and involve poor sleeping. Physical inactivity and poor sleep caused by daytime hypersomnia combine to contribute to physiopathology issues.

Poor Sleep Quality: Hypersomnia mean too much daytime sleepiness; however, there may be some restless sleep in nighttime that is worse than before. These low-quality night sleeps may worsen daytime sleepiness and put patients into a vicious cycle of unrefreshing nighttime sleep.

Diagnostic for Hypersomnia

Diagnosing hypersomnia, especially in the UK, includes various methods. Knowing about these methods can help you with proper and timely hypersomnia diagnosis. Here are some common stages or methods of hypersomnia-

• history of sleep or sleep history analysis
• diagnostic tests like polysomnography
• Multiplesleep Latency Test

These are necessary to understand the underlying causes of excessive sleepiness to inform the management of patients with it.

Hypersomnia Treatment

Managing hypersomnia or excessive daytime sleepiness can indeed be difficult. In the UK, treatment largely comprises several useful methods from medication, behavioural therapy, improvement in sleep hygiene and more. Here are some common treatments available for Hypersomnia -

• Use of drugs like benzodiazepine, CNS depressant, narcotic or z-drugs.
• Certain behavioral therapies like cognitive behavioural therapy.
• Lastly, management of any underlying causes, and adjustments to sleep habits.

Concentrating on the underlying cause of the hypersomnia and improving sleep hygiene will give the individual better control over their condition and enhance their quality of life. An overview of the principal treatment approaches currently used for hypersomnia in the UK is given below.

Natural Ways to Manage Hypersomnia and Improve Energy Levels

The implementation of natural remedies in treating hypersomnia or excessive daytime sleepiness is possible by taking a holistic route that maximizes overall wellness. In the UK, there is a major shift toward finding natural treatments for hypersomnia so that medication is not the only way to restore healthy sleep and energy levels.

Offer holistic strategies like:

Nutritional support: The Purpose of nutrition within the human body creates an important role to energize, maintain mood, and impact sleep patterns. The kind of foods that you feed your body boosts the potential of your body to fight tiredness. It also enhances the alertness ability in the body.

Exercise routines: Exercise is not only excellent for exhaustion and drowsiness; it has a lot more. Apart from these, it can include energy boosting, mood uplifting, stress relieving, and being better as an overall physical well-being.

Mindfulness and stress management: Chronic emotional strain and psychological fatigue are parts of the hypnogogic mechanisms. Mindfulness and stress-relieving techniques are also useful for the prevention methods in dealing with adverse effects of stress on energy, relaxing and focusing.

Limiting screen time and stimulants: One of the causes of hypersomnia is an excessive amount of screen time at night, with not enough time for sleep. Likewise, an over-dependence on stimulants such as caffeine or energy drink does not match the natural rhythm of the body, which eventually results in energy crashes.