Comfort promotion: Promoting rest and sleep

As a nursing assistant, one of your most important tasks is to ensure your clients are resting properly and having high-quality sleep.

That’s because insufficient rest and sleep can take a huge toll on your clients’ physical and emotional health.

For example, poor sleep reduces their pain tolerance and makes them more susceptible to infections, heart problems, and diabetes.

These clients can end up feeling really tired during the day which can make physical activities like walking down the hall more challenging and dangerous, with clients being more likely to sustain a fall injury.

Often, the fatigue can also lead to irritability and difficulty focusing, present challenges remembering and processing information, and can worsen feelings of depression and anxiety.

Now, the approximate amount of sleep needed in a 24-hour period varies greatly according to the client’s age group.

The older they are, the less sleep they need. So, newborns might get up to 17 hours of sleep per day, whereas, for adults, the recommended sleep range is typically 7 to 9 hours.

For older adults, it might be a bit more difficult to achieve this many hours of sleep without interruption through the night which is why naps during the day may help.

Poor sleep duration or quality is usually caused by factors that interrupt the sleep cycle, which is a period of sleep that lasts about 90 minutes, during which we move through five stages.

Over the course of the night, there are four or five sleep cycles. The first four stages make up non-rapid eye movement, or NREM sleep, which is roughly 80% of the sleep cycle, while the fifth part is rapid eye movement, or REM sleep, which accounts for the last 20% of the sleep cycle.

Across the four stages of NREM, we move from very light sleep during Stage 1 to very deep sleep in Stage 4. During NREM there’s minimal muscle activity, and our eyes don’t move much.

During REM sleep, the eyes dart around, and this is where dreaming occurs, memories are consolidated, and we get the most rest.

Several factors can contribute to poor sleep duration or quality. Starting with environmental factors, which are probably the most common ones, these include any change in the client’s usual environment from lighting and noises to bed and pillows.

Often, inadequate sleep might be a result of various stressors related to their health condition, financial hardships, or being apart from their loved ones.

It can also accompany lung diseases with difficulty breathing, kidney or bladder problems with increased frequency of urination, and a whole variety of conditions that might cause pain.

Okay, when sleep problems become a regular occurrence and interfere with daily life, that’s a sign of a sleep disorder: the most common of which are insomnia and sleep apnea.

In insomnia, clients have a hard time falling asleep or wake up throughout the night and can’t go back to sleep. It’s important to find out the cause.

Occasionally, medications can be used to treat this disorder, but they are generally used only for a short period of time because these can often have side effects, like making the client dizzy or lightheaded and thus more prone to falls.

The next sleep disorder is sleep apnea. This is characterized by irregular breathing and snoring patterns that can ultimately cause sleep apnea which is when the client momentarily stops breathing altogether.