Insomnia – What is it and how many of us does it affect?

Insomnia (Latin = somnus sleep) is characterized by a person having difficulty falling asleep or not sleeping enough. Frequent awakenings during the night or early in the morning are also signs of insomnia. It can severely hamper the activities of the person in question, create a shorter attention span,  induce irritability and cause memory problems.

In medicine, insomnia is part of the great family of sleep disorders, which include narcolepsy (sudden trances and an unpredictable happening of a state of sleep), hypersomnia (excessive need to sleep), and disturbance of  rhythms of  sleep patterns in an individual (due to jet lag, irregular schedules, etc.)..

Generally, by addressing the cause of insomnia, most people find restful sleep after a few weeks. However, in some cases it takes years to resolve the problem, especially if the insomnia is related to psychological trauma.

Note that some people only get a few hours sleep per night, this doesn’t necessarily make them insomniacs. For all instances of insomnia, there is ussually always a negative impact on the persons life.

Types of insomnia

There are two types of insomnia:
Acute insomnia, which lasts from one to three weeks;
chronic insomnia, which occurs at least three nights a week for at least a month.

Prevalence

Statistics on the prevalence of insomnia vary from one source to another, because the “criteria for insomnia” as used in the surveys are not always the same from one to the next. Some researches are based on the duration of symptoms, while others may affect their degree of severity, while others, on their presence or not. The most often used is the frequency of symptoms of insomnia.

According to the latest survey on the Canadian Community Health, approximately 13% of Canadians aged 15 and over have insomnia. According to this same survey, 36.5% of insomniacs do not usually feel refreshed upon awakening, while only 9.2% of people who say they do not sleep are tired in the morning. The survey also shows that people with insomnia sleep on average one hour less per night than people who do not suffer with this affliction.

Insomnia is a condition that effects a respectable portion of the population and can seriously affect a persons well being. Read more here at Health-cures.com about Insomnia in our other articles covering everything from what the symptoms are to what kind of alternative therapies are suggested to help an individual cope.

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