All these factors may contribute to difficulty sleeping or falling asleep. Understanding how allergies affect your sleeping habits is a great starting point to eradicating the dilemma.
Allergy Symptoms
Allergens irritate the nasal passages, making breathing more difficult. Nasal congestion and other allergy symptoms are often greater at night. When allergies impair your sleep quantity and quality, they may negatively affect your quality of life, in turn impairing your ability to enjoy daily activities.
Allergies might also result in everyday drowsiness, particularly if you constantly wake up from coughing or sneezing. These symptoms will drain your energy and leave you feeling lethargic, affecting your performance on the job. Some people attempt to combat this by drinking a glass of wine or taking sedatives before bed, but that might hinder their sleeping efforts, since it’s not natural.
Remedies
Luckily, there are some solutions for intense allergies. You might need to find answers in a medical capacity, but there are also things you can try at home to limit their effects.
Use an Air Purifier
Air pollution can exacerbate several allergies. Furthermore, if you have pets, pet dander will pervade your house, especially where they lounge. Therefore, if your cuddly loved one sleeps with you, that might be the reason why you’re so stuffy. Additionally, pollen may affect you inside and outdoors, and some forms of pollen are more abundant at night than during the day.
Thankfully, an air purifier can improve sleep quality in allergy-sufferers. Air purifiers are good at removing these sorts of pollutants from the bedroom environment, alleviating allergy symptoms while you sleep.
Make Lifestyle Changes
Making some small changes in your lifestyle can also positively affect your life. For starters, kicking your furry friend off the bed can improve your congestion while you snooze. Also, washing your hands after you pet them can reduce your exposure to dander.
Another idea that can alleviate your pollen problems is closing up your house. Ideally, you can do this without turning on the air conditioner. But desperate times call for desperate measures once the temperatures surpass 80 degrees.
Lastly, please speak to your doctor because they see how allergies are affecting your sleeping habits daily. All it may take is an over-the-counter prescription that lets you breathe easy. Know that you are not alone and there is light at the end of the tunnel. Better yet, a cow jumping over the moon in your not-so-distant future.
To make allergies more bearable, change the air conditioner filters at home regularly. If the instructions for the filter say that it should be replaced once every three months, change it once a month or two months. If it seems quite expensive for you, purchase washable filters. Washable filters are the most economical as they can be reused for 5 to 10 years.
I would say the same about furnaces. They also have air filters that need to be replaced or washed from time to time to prevent poor air quality and inefficient operation of the unit.
Oh, allergies can be truly debilitating. If you or someone in your house has an allergy, try to keep windows closed just to prevent allergens such as pollen and dust from getting into the house. I know it can be tempting to open the window to let fresh air in, but this “fresh” air can be a trigger for a person suffering from allergies. It’s better to use air conditioning for ventilation. But if you have an air conditioner, you should remember to replace its filters once every few months. In your situation, you may need to do it even more often.