26 May, 2009 7:50AM AEDT

Watching you while you sleep

If you're not getting a good night's sleep, one option is to spend a night in a sleep study centre to have your sleep recorded, monitored, and analysed.

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If you're not getting a good night's sleep, then maybe you need to have your sleep analysed in a sleep study unit.

Here in the south west there are a couple of these facilities where you can be wired up for the night and monitored while asleep to try and work out why you mightn't be getting the sleep you need.

The sleep study centre in Hamilton is a fairly unassuming house near the hospital which can accomodate three patients a night.

In a typical sleep study, a patient will spend one night at the centre in a room which is set up with a TV and a single bed.

The aim is to make the experience as familiar as possible so patients are encouraged to do whatever they usually do before going to bed - having a shower, reading, doing some work, and so on.

Depending on what's being studied, about 15 wires are attached to various parts of the body (mostly about the head), although wires may also be attached to record leg movement, breathing, and chest movement.

Despite the various cords, you can still move quite freely in the bed, although you will need some help if you need to get up.

It's hard to imagine how well people sleep in this situation, but as sleep technologist Rachel Verschuren says, people usually sleep surprisingly well - not as well as they might at home, but well enough to get some useful results.

Patients are often encouraged to also bring their own pillows to make things more normal.

During the night, the sleep centre staff monitor the patients, and infrared cameras record your sleep and movement as well so the staff can make sure none of the wires fall off and that everything goes as smoothly as possible.

The next stage of the process is analyzing the results.

As Hamilton based respiratory and sleep physician Dr Andrew Bradbeer explains, it can take a few days to go over the results to work out why someone might not be getting a good night's sleep.

The most common cause though is sleep apnoea, where the muscles of the throat are relaxing too much and causing breathing difficulties.

Luckily this is something which can be fixed if the sleep apnoea is particularly bad.

There are still many things about sleep which are not fully understood - as Andrew says, we can describe a lot about what happens when we sleep, but no-one has been able to answer the question why we need to sleep in the first place.

One thing we do know is that sleep is not entirely about switching off - there are many processes which 'switch on' when we sleep.

There are five different stages of sleep, the most famous and deepest of which is probably rapid eye movement (REM) or the dream stage.

During a typical night, people will cycle through the various stages of sleep and possibly spend longer dreaming each time they reach the REM stage.

Many people aren't aware there's a problem with their sleep until someone else points it out to them - in most cases this comes from a partner who might be woken up by the other's snoring.

Shiftwork remains a problem for sleep as well as it's very difficult to be constantly adjusting to different sleep times and sleep patterns.

Sleep centre patients are usually referred through their GP and come from all kinds of walks of life, although the bulk of the people who spend the night at the sleep centre are middle aged men who tend to be on the shorter, plumper side.