|
 An environmental
conditioning component related to insomnia has been postulated.
This means that as people experience difficulty sleeping in their
environment, various features (stimuli) of the bedroom and the
time period or rituals preceding sleep can become associated with
fears of and frustrations about sleeplessness or sleep loss. A
form of anticipatory anxiety develops that creates a level of
mental and physiological activation that impedes sleep induction.
This raises a question about the laboratory environment for sleep
and its affect on usual sleep. If one is conditioned to sleep
poorly in their usual environment, will they sleep better if removed
from their usual environment? Alternatively, if one is sensitive
to one's environment but is a good sleeper in the usual one, does
moving to the sleep laboratory worsen sleep?
Fortunately,
it has been determined that most people adapt quickly to the laboratory
sleep environment and can fall asleep with usual ease (or display
a typical amount of difficulty) after a short period of adaptation.
These observations underlie the common protocol used in sleep
studies, which is to conduct multiple nights of PSG sleep assessment
and separate out the first night as an adaptation night from overall
analysis.
Trying to
minimize the effect of a strange sleeping environment has led
to technologies developed for home monitoring. Monitoring in the
home carries its own set of methodological liabilities, including
the as-yet-unavoidable necessity of applying electrodes; missing
data due to lack of technical oversight during the recording period;
and electrical interference with signals.
|