People have to sleep – that’s just the way the world works. Going without sleep can greatly hurt your quality of life – it makes your days crappy and seem to last forever, you stop enjoying things because they become a hassle in your tired state and you miss a lot of opportunities because you’re just too tired to participate. So how do you know if you’re actually suffering from insomnia and it’s not just a few sleepless nights? The most obvious symptom of insomnia is, of course, not being able to fall asleep; this can involve lying awake for hours every night and trying to sleep without any success.
Figure out if you’re actually having real trouble falling asleep – you don’t have to be asleep the second your head hits the pillow but you should not be spending an hour or more every single night trying to fall asleep and it definitely shouldn’t be happening over an extended period of time. You should also keep track of whether or not you are waking up several times a night and struggling to get back to sleep – that should not be happening either. And you have to take into account other symptoms as well, like waking up in the morning feeling like you didn’t sleep at all anyway. There are also other things that go hand-in-hand with insomnia – things like irritability and anxiousness are a bi-product as well.
To cure insomnia you have to figure out what causes it and that’s where things get a little tricky because insomnia has many different causes. The most common cause of insomnia is usually stress-related – stress over bills, work or other things can make it impossible for the brain to shut down and the person to sleep no matter how hard they try. Other causes include mental disorders like post traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and even clinical depression. Even mundane things like jet-lag or medications can cause someone to start to suffer from insomnia for a short period of time.
After finding out if you do have insomnia many people wonder how they can do about curing it. A therapist teaches someone good sleep habits – no caffeine after a certain time, sleeping in a dark room, etc – and helps eliminate poor ones as well. They can also choose to prescribe meditation although that is usually a last resort since most sleep mediations carry a risk of dependency. Answering the question of “Do I have insomnia?†can be difficult but it’s not impossible.