Insomnia Clinic

Understanding Insomnia:

A sleep condition called insomnia causes difficulty falling asleep, frequent night-time awakenings, and early morning awakenings. Chronic insomnia has a number of reasons, including:

1. Stress: It may be challenging to get to sleep at night because of worry about your family, your career, your health, your finances, or other matters. Traumatic or stressful life situations like divorce, losing your job, losing a loved one to illness or death can also cause insomnia.
2. Travel or obligations for work: Your body's temperature, metabolism, and sleep-wake cycle are all controlled by your circadian rhythms, which act as an internal clock. Insomnia may be brought on by a circadian rhythm disorder. Some of the causes include jet lag brought on by changing time zones, working a late or early shift, or often change shifts.
3. Poor sleeping habits: Poor sleep habits include irregular bedtime routines, naps, stimulating activities immediately before bed, uncomfortable sleeping conditions, and using your bed for work, eating, or watching TV. Using computers, TVs, video games, mobile phones, or other electronics right before bed may interfere with your sleep pattern.
4. Consuming large amounts of food late at night: While a short snack before bed is okay, if you eat too much, you may have physical discomfort when you lie down. Another frequent illness that could keep you awake is heartburn, which is the reflux of acid and food into the oesophagus after eating.

Other factors, including illnesses and drug use, also contribute to chronic sleeplessness. Even when the physical issue may be resolved and greater sleep results, insomnia may still persist.

Additional common causes of insomnia include:

1. Diseases of the mind: Your sleep may be disturbed by anxiety disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. An early awakening could indicate sadness. Insomnia often coexists with other mental health disorders.
2. Medications: Numerous prescription drugs, such as certain antidepressants and medications for asthma or high blood pressure, can cause sleep disturbances. Numerous over-the-counter medicines, including certain pain relievers, allergy and cold remedies, and weight-loss drugs, include stimulants like caffeine that might keep you awake at night.
3. Health problems: Chronic pain, cancer, diabetes, heart illness, asthma, gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), an overactive thyroid, Parkinson's disease, and Alzheimer's disease are a few disorders that have been related to sleeplessness.
4. Sleep-related conditions: If you have sleep apnea, your breathing may stop repeatedly during the night, which will disturb your sleep. Restless legs syndrome may cause your legs to feel uncomfortable and to desire to move practically incessantly, which may prevent you from falling asleep.
5. Caffeinated drinks including coffee, tea, cola, and others are stimulants. Other stimulants include alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine. If you consume them in the late afternoon or evening, you can experience trouble falling asleep at night. Another stimulant that may prevent you from falling asleep is nicotine, which is a stimulant contained in tobacco products. Alcohol may aid in your ability to fall asleep, but it hinders deeper sleep and frequently results in night-time awakenings.

Insomnia and aging

With ageing, insomnia becomes more prevalent. As you become older, you could experience:

1. Changes in sleeping patterns: As we age, sleep often becomes less restful, increasing the likelihood that noise or other environmental disturbances may wake us up. As you age, your internal clock tends to advance, which makes you go to bed and get up sooner. Elderly people still need the same amount of sleep that younger people do, in general.
2. Alterations in activity: You could engage in less exercise or socialising. Lack of exercise may make it harder to get a good night's sleep. Additionally, taking a daily nap may be more likely if you are less active, which may interfere with your ability to sleep at night.
3. Health changes: Chronic discomfort from conditions like arthritis or back problems, as well as from depression or stress, can cause sleep abnormalities. Conditions like prostate problems or bladder problems, which increase the desire to urinate during the night, might interrupt sleep. Sleep apnea and restless legs syndrome are becoming more common as people age.
4. Additional medicines: Older adults tend to use prescription pharmaceuticals more frequently than younger ones, which raise the risk of sleeplessness brought on by prescriptions.

Symptoms:

1. Sleepiness during the day.
2. Fatigue
3. Grumpiness
4. Problem with concentration or memory.
5. Depressed mood

Diagnosis:

Physical examination

Medical history and sleep history.

Lab tests for related health problems.

Prognosis:

Some insomniacs report improved sleep after altering their daily and evening routines. Therapy or drugs might assist with sleep when these modifications are ineffective:

1. Diabetes
2. Driving accidents, injuries and falls
3. High blood pressure
4. Heart diseases or stroke
5. Mood disorders
6. Weight gain and obesity

Treatment:

1. It is recommended to take sleeping tablets for insomnia in severe circumstances. That is not a lasting fix.
2. CBT is effective in treating insomnia. It is suggested to make lifestyle modifications to get rid of sleeplessness.
3. Insomnia and stress can both contribute to one another. They may each be the other's symptoms. Margdarsi introduces Therapeutic Yoga and mindfulness training to assist you deal with these problems.
4. 1. The use of functional medicine can treat insomnia.