Physically, you are completely worn out and wish for nothing more than a good night’s sleep. However, once in bed, you toss and turn, sometimes not getting a wink of sleep all night. Even when you finally think you are able to get some sleep, you awaken to find that you have been asleep for only about an hour.
You can’t seem to concentrate on your work either. You are very irritable and moody. After a few nights of not being able to sleep, you seem completely withdrawn from others and are constantly depressed.
Not to mention that with your lack of attention at work, your boss is probably after you as well.
Sound familiar?
If this has been happening on a regular basis, you could be suffering from insomnia.
Rest assured that having insomnia is very common. This does not mean you are weird or crazy, it simply means that you have a problem, and that you need to identify what factors are causing you to lose sleep before establishing how you can overcome them to finally get that much needed snooze.
How do you judge the severity of your insomnia? If you find yourself not being able to get that much needed few hours more than 3 times a week and this goes for more than a month, then you are suffering from chronic insomnia that you need to look into.
Anything less is known as short term or acute insomnia, which can still badly affect you despite perhaps sounding less severe.
Let’s get a better understanding of the definition and type of insomnia you actually have. Clinically, two types of insomnia have been identified.
The world we live in and the stress that comes as part of it often brings on ‘secondary insomnia’. This is the most common type of insomnia and based on research done by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, it can affect as many as 8 out of 10 people. How is secondary insomnia different from primary insomnia?
Secondary insomnia indicates that the insomnia you have is being caused by factors that are related to emotional, neurological or medical disorders that you are already having. These can include:
• Another illness or condition that you already have (most commonly related to arthritis, heart and lung conditions).
Neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s can also cause secondary insomnia;
• Emotional factors such as post traumatic stress syndrome, or anxiety or depression related to incidents in your work or personal life;
• Your consumption of tobacco, alcohol or coffee. These may be wonderful to consume, especially as they probably appear unlikely to actually cause your sleep to falter, but they do;
• Medication that you are already taking for other conditions that might have an adverse side effect on your sleep or, in this case, the lack of it.
On the other hand, primary insomnia is not brought on by any single factor and is a condition in itself that lasts up to a maximum of one month.
While a number of life changes such as emotional upsets, travel, or even changed sleeping habits (particularly what time you go to bed) can be related to primary insomnia, there is no fixed factor as to why primary insomnia comes and goes.
Although it may seem easier said than done, curing or improving secondary insomnia can be done given time, although this depends on how soon the causes can be determined and eventually eliminated.
There is the quick fix of going to a doctor to get medication, but this may do more to mask the condition than get rid of it. You don’t want to take pharmaceuticals anyway, do you?
You would prefer a natural cure, which is exactly what this is book is going to show you in the hope that, by doing so, it will help ensure that you get that much needed sleep!
