Insomnia Symptoms

Insomnia Symptoms are broadly categorized into acute insomnia symptoms and chronic insomnia symptoms.

Acute insomnia Symptoms:

Among the different sleeping disorders, insomnia is being considered deadly serious by almost all of the people who suffer from sleeping disorders. This is because insomnia triggers the individual to doze off to sleep unexpectedly during the day due to lack of sleep they had during the night.

Insomnia symptoms are generally characterized by inadequate amount of sleep brought about by a wide range of factors such as waking up more often during sleep at night, difficulty in falling asleep and falling back to sleep, restless sleep, and waking up too early in the morning considering the fact that the person had only slept for a few hours only, say, two or three hours.

Basically, insomnia occurs to people who have been ill for quite sometime, those who came from travel, changes in the environment, jet lag, stress from recent work-related problems, psychological problems, etc.

Chronic Insomnia Symptoms :

The term chronic simply means unceasing, therefore, when experts tell people they have chronic insomnia, this means that the kind of insomnia that they experience are more constant compared to the transient insomnia.

Generally, chronic insomnia symptoms are that people suffer from difficulty of falling asleep that have the tendency to become so weakening that other signs of different illness follow.

Failure to treat this kind of insomnia will result to what health experts define as conditioned insomnia or those that is constant in its occurrence. This type of insomnia symptoms will last for longer period of time, usually from 6 months to a year or even longer.

Conditioned insomnia symptoms are characterized by a persistent and worsening condition of the person suffering from the basic conditions of insomnia.

It may pose dilemma to people who experience insomnia symptoms but the problem does not lie on the conditions it manifests but on the inability of the person to identify the underlying cause of the problem. That is why it is extremely important to know what insomnia is all about and what causes such condition.

Insomnia Risk Factors

Depression and chronic pain: The common risk factors for insomnia are physical problems like headaches and chronic pain and psychiatric problems like depression. Ninety percent of people with depression are suffering with insomnia. Treating insomnia can help in recovering the patients from depression more quickly.

Negative thoughts: Stressful events are not the cause for insomnia in everyone. Negative thoughts towards stressful events can be the significant factor in insomnia. The stressful events will be common for good and poor sleepers. But, the stressful events will be more intensive in people who experience insomnia.

Gender factors: Insomnia is more common in women than men. Number of hormonal episodes can disturb sleep in women, including menstruation, pregnancy, premenstrual syndrome and menopause. Women after child birth also sleep less due to the sounds of the newborn child, which makes them to wake up easily.

Being older: As a person becomes old, their sleep patterns change. Older people wake up frequently during night resulting in the cause of insomnia. Many conditions can disturb the sleep in elderly. Medical conditions associated with pain are common and is a risk factor of insomnia. Neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s, Dementia and Alzheimer’s can disturb the sleep.

Elderly people who take prescription drugs for different medical conditions experience side effects including insomnia. Arthritis, frequent urination, heart conditions, gastrointestinal diseases, and lung diseases are also the high risk factors of insomnia.

Shift work: Shift work can disturb body’s circadian rhythm. Shift work can constantly interrupt sleep that results in insomnia. Shift works are always changing and a shift worker finds hard to adjust to the timings of the shifts, which results in sleeplessness.