In recent years, there has been an increased focus on the importance of sleep, as more and more research show just how important sleep is for both our bodies, brains and overall health. Therefore, sleep is also becoming an area of great attention within the healthcare sector. However, ensuring that a client gets the proper amount of sleep is not as easy as it sound.
Today, we have to live up to a lot of demands from both our work life and social life. Therefore, sleep is in short supply for many. However, underestimating sleep is a very bad idea! This is because sleep has great significance for both your body and your brain.
When we sleep, we go through four stages, which have each their own purpose. Particularly, the deep sleep is important. It is during this phase that our brain is washed free of toxins.
If we don’t get enough deep sleep toxins will accumulate in the brain. This means, that the brain will react slower, we have a harder time remembering things and that we generally perform worse than usual.
This influences our work efforts but more importantly our health.
In the end, poor sleep quality or too little sleep can lead to a deterioration of our immune system and lead to serious conditions such as obesity, vascular diseases and stress. Research has also shown that people who work night shifts shorten their lives with 5-7 years.
Sleep is also important for the clients we care for every day. However, it can be difficult to know if a client is getting the necessary hours of sleep he or she needs and even more difficult to know if the sleep they are getting is of a high enough quality.
Therefore, it is important to look into signs from the client that their sleep quality is poor. For instance, are they dozing off even before they have had their breakfast? Or are they sleeping a lot throughout the day?
To improve the client’s sleep quality, it is necessary to create the best circumstances for sleep. This includes taking elements such as light, heat, noise and other interruptions into consideration.
There can be a lot of elements that disturb the clients sleep, and an individual assessment has to be made in order to identify what methods to use in the concrete situation in order to create a better sleep quality.
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