HEALTH & WELLNESS: Can't sleep? Your body may lack this important nutrient.

  Author: S. Gordon-Jeffery

Last year (2020) I wasn't feeling myself at all. I didn't know what was wrong. All I knew was that I felt tired and listless. Soon I was having difficulty falling asleep or after sleeping and waking up later in the night, going back to sleep again. As I shared in my previous article about my sleeping difficulty, I never really took it seriously, but as you get older conditions build up and situations become more serious.  

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I started noticing in 2019 that I had a slightly irregular heart beat, nothing too serious. I remembered experiencing the problem in 2013 when I caught chicken pox and I took medication for it that didn't 'gree wid mi'. I felt like my heart was bursting out of my chest. I stopped taking the pills the second day that happened. When I fully recovered from the 'pox' the rapid heart rate problem went away and I was my normal self again. I never gave what happened a second thought.

But 2019 was a rough year for me. Mi seh mi have problem a sleep. Mi feel anxious, mi heart a race like one harse pon race track!  I thought it was stress and maybe just maybe, staying up late was the reason. For four (4) years straight I would rise up from 6:00 am and go to bed after 12:00 am every day, including Sundays. I was like, "I got work to do. I gotta get this money!"

It was around year 4 (2019), after having some severe pain brought on by an illness I was battling, that I tried some yoga poses and as I revealed in the article link I shared above, that was a disaster. Things improved a little by the end of the year. 2019 was a particularly hot year so I figured it was the heat that kept me up at night or caused restless sleep -- you know the kind where you sleep but still wake up feeling tired, yes that kind. So you know, I ignored the warning signs and went forward with my life.

In 2020, I started looking up on rapid heart rate, and found words such as arrhythmia and tachycardia. 

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Researching about these terms I learned that sometimes a rapid heart rate can be normal, if it occurs for a short period of time. In this case, a rapid heart rate can be caused by fright - as in a sudden shock, exercise or even a stressful situation. It can also be caused by anxiety. I knew I had several things on my mind, maybe it was stress.  

After much reading I learned that a rapid heart rate could be caused by an infection, the compromised immune system in order to compensate, causes the heart to pump more blood around the body, releasing white blood cells to fight off an infection, e.g the flu [1].

It wasn't until the rapid heart rate became more intense and sometimes it felt like my heart was pounding through my chest and my body shook with the vibrations; it became a regular part of my life, and I had difficulty sleeping through the night or not falling asleep until the wee hours of the morning --this happening more frequently, that I started getting worried. Also, when I started feeling exhausted just from doing little things, I knew there must really be something wrong with me. I realised that this issue was not just going to go away and this time I needed to get help.

Early last year (Covid-19 did barely reach), I visited the doctor and told him about my difficulty sleeping, heart palpitations, etc and he prescribed some special type of iron pills, ones which also contain zinc, vitamin C, etcetera.  He sent me to a nutritionist. I also had to find out my hemoglobin levels via a blood count test. Hemoglobin is a protein your body makes from iron in your red blood cells, that carries oxygen from your lungs to other parts of your body. Suffice it to say my hemoglobin levels were below the recommended levels for women. A woman's hemoglobin level -- should be between 12.0 and 15.5 grams [2]. Below dat a trouble! Above that ...that is another story, but that's not good either.

So what did I learn?

I am iron deficient. I know why. One thing I can do about it is improve my nutritional intake. Vitamin C helps your body absorb iron so I try to include more fruits in my diet, and along with iron supplements I take vitamin C. I also try to reduce my stress level by exercising and thinking more positively. Yes, it has helped much. Next blog post I will tell you the signs you should look out for which could mean you're iron deficient. I listed a few I experienced in this blog: insomnia, rapid heart rate, feeling tired, but there is more. So I will share the full gamut of what I went through, and some of what I still suffer from, in the next article entitled 'Ten (10) signs your body is telling you that you could be iron deficient'.

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References

      Jamaican dialect in Italics.

1. Kilaru, Harish. 'How your heart rate can show signs of the Flu'. Cardiogram. Published March 19, 2020. https://blog.cardiogr.am/how-your-heart-rate-can-show-signs-of-the-flu-9b021feb0c98
2. Frame, Lauren. 'Healthy iron levels for women'. Oneblood. Published September 29, 2020. https://www.oneblood.org/media/blog/iron/healthy-iron-levels-for-women.stml