Having a stoma is a major change in your life and it can take time to learn to how to cope with getting a good night’s sleep is so important for your mental and physical well-being. It helps you to recharge body and mind and sets you up for a positive day. As well as products that can help you achieve a more comfortable sleep, you might want to try some practical exercises to help you relax, unwind and drift off. The 4-7-8 breathing technique is thought to help reduce nervousness and stress, calm anxiety, and help people get to sleep more quickly.
If you can’t attend support groups in person, these online resources may help:
Dr Lindsay Browning is a chartered psychologist, neuroscientist, qualified sleep expert and author. Here Dr Browning advises on how we can all make changes to help improve our sleep.
Sleep is associated with a whole range of benefits: it is healing and allows the body to repair, such as after surgery or an illness. It boosts our immune system, can help regulate certain hormones and a lack of sleep has been linked to certain types of cancer. If sleep was a drug, it would be amazing to prescribe!
However, there are times in our lives when we just won’t experience great sleep, whether that is due to highly stressful life situations or illnesses, the menopause or a new baby. In these situations it can be helpful to accept and acknowledge that good sleep is just not attainable during this period, and we should aim not to dwell on our lack of sleep as the anxiety can become a vicious circle.
Generally speaking, a working age adult needs between 7-9 hours and for those over 65 it is 7-8 hours. However, that is very general and we are all different shapes, heights and sizes. So we say somewhere near this range is likely to be sufficient and it is actually more important that the sleep you get is regular.
Getting these amounts of sleep regularly is much better for you than a feast and famine approach of 3 or 4 nights of ‘great sleep’ followed by 2 or 3 very poor or short nights of sleep. It isn’t really possible to fully ‘top up’ or catch up on sleep.
Approximately every 1 1/2 hours we go through a full sleep cycle: light sleep to deep sleep, back to light sleep again and then REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Between each full sleep cycle we will briefly wake before going back to sleep again. Most of the times, these awakenings are so brief that we don’t remember waking up at all. So everyone’s sleep is “broken” at times, the important thing is that we go back to sleep again quickly.
As long as you are getting a few good blocks of sleep, the quality of your sleep is just the same as ‘sleeping through the night’. Sleep does not need to be fully unbroken to be of good quality.
Anxiety can cause us to become more aware of the fact we are waking up in between sleep cycles, and it can lead to being unable to fall back to sleep due to this heightened awareness.
When we are anxious, we feel a threat to ourselves as a result of adrenaline and cortisol running through our bodies. Our brain responds in the same way as when experiencing a response to a threat - super-alert, ready to react. So it becomes a vicious circle: worrying about not going to sleep makes the brain even less likely to fall asleep.
There are two aspects to winding down before bed and they are quite different:
Physiological – calming your body down
The mind – calming and slowing your mind
Physiological wind-down:
It is important to do something that will calm and relax you before going to bed. Everyone is different, so it must be something that YOU find relaxing, but could be: yoga, meditation, a long relaxing bath, sex, reading a book or watching a film. Slow and deep breathing techniques can help to calm the body (see the 4-7-8 at the top of Sleep Well-being page).
Light levels:
The bright light emitted from phones and devices is not helpful to prepare the body for sleep as the brain thinks it’s daytime, stops producing melatonin and wakes us up. Enabling ‘Night Mode’ on your device is an improvement as the light is not quite as bright.
Often people feel that bedtime is the only time they can really have to scroll through social media or check messages. However, it would be much better for your sleep if you actively make time earlier in the day to do this so you do not feel that pressure to grab some ‘me time’ after you’ve gone to bed.
Calming the mind:
Sometimes the big issues of the day are thought of at night when we stop and lie down. There are techniques to try and block the timing of these thoughts including:
You may also find distraction techniques helpful, including:
If you have tried everything and you just can’t get to sleep, try getting up out of bed. Lying there and trying to force sleep can make you more anxious and frustrated, and your body becomes even more awake. You will often find you are able to sleep upon your return to bed after a reset.
If you are unable to get out of bed, try sitting up with dim light, read for a while. No devices. Then try again.
Explore different sleeping positions and the use of pillows to help you get comfortable and to support the body. Be more aware of what you eat later in the day as this may affect the stoma’s function during the night and therefore could disturb your sleep.
All of the techniques to reduce anxiety can be used to reduce any anxiety surrounding whether the bag will leak – and remember it’s quite unlikely to happen.
Trouble Sleeping
Visit Dr Lindsay Browning’s website: troublesleeping.co.uk or find her on social media DrBrowningSleep
Her book Navigating Sleeplessness: How to Sleep Deeper and Better for Longer is available to buy online.
Having a stoma is a major change in your life and it can take time to adapt to your new lifestyle. You may need support with learning how to cope with difficult emotions, how to get used to your altered body or support with building your confidence. We have various support tools and resources which are aimed to help improve your well-being. Explore these tools and resources below.
Confidence BE® has a range of features that may help improve self-esteem, body image, comfort, confidence and sleep quality by helping to reduce leaks, odour, ballooning, pancaking, noise and skin irritation.
Choice of three colours: black, white and stone. Available in closed, drainable, urostomy, flat and soft convex.
The filter is designed to ensure that a gas path can always be maintained to help reduce ballooning, and to help neutralise odour.
Urostomy hydrocolloid resists fluid and erosion for longer*.
* In comparison to Salts Confidence® Natural Advance Closed and Drainable stoma bags. 25% less erosion over a 24-hour period. Data on file. Salts Healthcare 2022.
Outlet tucks away and is securely fastened with premium VELCRO® hook and loop fastener material.
Outlet tucks aways and is securely fastened with premium VELCRO® hook and loop fastener material.
Soft outlet and bung are comfortable without compromising ease of use.
Rotating and detachable bung lanyard can be moved away from urine flow when draining.
We offer a wide range of one-piece colostomy bags and two-piece colostomy bags designed to make life easier with innovative features for greater comfort, flexibility and security. We have a range of colostomy supplies for you to sample from.
Our one-piece colostomy product range includes:
Our two-piece colostomy product range includes;
Both our one-piece and two-piece closed stoma bags are available in flat and convex.
