Difficulty sleeping
Insomnia, Sleep
Sleep is essential for our health and wellbeing. A poor night's sleep can make it harder to cope with worries, manage pain, physical symptoms, treatment side effects and can also affect concentration and memory. Many people with cancer find that their sleep is disturbed. Whilst the occasional lost night’s sleep feels manageable, ongoing sleeplessness (insomnia) can feel exhausting, and lead to anxiety and depression.
The causes for a broken night’s sleep can be due to a number of factors. The cancer itself, side effects of treatments, pain, and anxiety can all disturb sleep.
The information on this page will help you to find out more about sleeplessness, and ways to manage it, during and after cancer treatment. Good management of sleep can greatly improve your feelings of wellbeing.
We've collected our favourite resources for you to read, watch, listen to, download and share to better understand and manage this concern, as well as clinical services if you would prefer to speak to someone about the emotional challenges of cancer treatment.
Can-Sleep: Making night time sleep problems go away.
PETER MACCALLUM CANCER CENTRE
We recommend this resource because...
This booklet is more in-depth than the locally developed resource but it can help people with existing sleep problems, provides strategies to cope if new sleep problems arise and suggestions to prevent sleep problems worsening.
Occupational Therapists
Occupational Therapists can help you to improve independence, safety, wellbeing and quality of life. If you would like to link with one of our occupational therapists, please ask your treating health professional to send a referral.
