Health Home Conditions and Diseases. Overview While the rest of the world is sleeping, some people remain wide-awake due to insomnia. Prevention To help ensure that you can fall asleep when you want to—and stay asleep for the quality rest you need—make sleep a priority in your life. Be sure to follow these recommendations: Establish a presleep ritual before bed.
In the evenings, avoid activities that can keep you awake, like drinking coffee, soda, or other caffeinated drinks; smoking; exercising; and eating heavy meals. Give your brain time to unwind. If you need to pay bills or settle an argument, do it during the day, not at bedtime. Avoid light in the late evening.
Shut off your electronic devices at least 30 minutes before bedtime. Light keeps your brain primed for wakefulness.
If you have sleepless nights, avoid: Napping during the day. Too much daytime sleep makes you less inclined to fall asleep at bedtime. Drinking alcohol before bed.
It may help you fall asleep at first, but it can keep you from sleeping well later in the night. Worrying about your sleep loss. Dwelling on your inability to fall asleep can make it worse. Be ready to discuss these issues and perhaps track them in a sleep diary : What time you go to bed and when you get up How long it takes you to fall asleep How deeply you think you sleep How much of your time in bed you actually spend asleep as opposed to getting up to use the bathroom or staring at the clock Your health care provider should ask about your daytime activities too: Do you smoke or drink coffee?
How often do you exercise? Do you take naps? Your doctor may ask if you watch TV or run a small business from this room. If your spouse keeps irregular hours, or your dog sleeps—and barks—in your bedroom, mention it. Is your life peaceful right now, or are you worried about your job, a family conflict or another stressful issue? Your discussion should also cover your mental and physical health : Do you have symptoms of depression , anxiety or bipolar disorder? Have you ever been diagnosed with an emotional or mental health problem?
Do you have health issues that cause pain or discomfort, like headaches , heartburn , asthma or fibromyalgia? Could you have another sleeping problem, like apnea or restless legs syndrome?
What medications are you taking? A sleep psychologist, working with your sleep doctor, may recommend these approaches: Relaxation techniques before bedtime, such as deep breathing. Identifying your sleep-related worries and learning to set them aside.
This gets you out of the habit of lying in bed awake. Giving your brain extra help with getting on the right sleep cycle. Exposing yourself to bright light during the day, keeping the lights dim during the evening, and taking the sleep hormone melatonin may be useful, Salas says.
Most over-the-counter sleep aids contain antihistamines. One effect of these is drowsiness. A number of prescription sleep medications are available. They can have side effects, such as headaches and daytime sleepiness. They may also raise the risk of falls at night, especially in older people. So that would make it past 3am. I fight the urge to check the clock. It always says terrible things like Checking the clock just amplifies the anguish: that I am awake, have been for hours and will be, quite possibly, for ever.
What a fictional horror that would make: someone who has forgotten how to sleep. For now at least, that someone is me. My rational self — which has been having quite a tough time of it lately — knows that this will pass.
In a while, a few days perhaps, maybe a grotty week or two, I will reemerge on the other side and ask myself what all the fuss was about. Then, I will approach my bed and my pillow with a shrug, climb in and go out like a light. You go to bed, you sleep. It's easy, right? I'll enjoy several weeks, months even, of perfectly average, unremarkable sleep.
And then suddenly, like flicking a diabolical thought-wave machine, it will start up again. Until recently, I didn't struggle too much with sleep. There was a strange week once. It would have been , because the Falklands war was going on and I think I was quite troubled by it.
I was 12 and starting for the first time to feel a bit unsure about things. I lay in bed, night after night, and just couldn't sleep until 1 or 2am.
I would wake my parents, and my dad would come in and explain that it didn't really matter. Lots of people, he said, had to stay up all night to do their job. He used to be in the navy, and so used the example of a duty officer on deck, in command of a frigate or a destroyer on the high seas through the night watch. I thought of ships sinking in the south Atlantic, and became more wakeful than ever. Apart from that week in , sleep was a neutral presence in my life. I have calculated that I have had 20 different homes since I left the house I was born in, 24 years ago.
There have been a wide variety of beds in that time: student mattresses on creaky floorboards, Soviet sofa beds with envelope sheets into which you folded a blanket; a nasty specimen supplied by a cheap landlord that felt like it had been fashioned from a box of rusty spanners tied up with string. I slept like the dead in all of them. But after I had a nervous breakdown in , sleep was one of the first things to go.
As I've got better it has been one of the last things to resolve itself. For the insomniac, different times of the night have different qualities. The time between 10pm and This is the time that you feel nostalgic about when the clock reads For at this time, there is still a chance that you will disappear suddenly into the void and, the next thing you know, there will be birdsong and milkmen and dawn tiptoeing into the edges of the room.
Still a hope, still a chance. The second phase is unsettling and takes you up until the streets are quiet and the house is cold. Here the feeling is that if you do manage to get off to sleep, all is not lost. The next day will be OK; you will have cause for mild optimism in the morning. And the longer you are an insomniac, the more you recognise that this is your real window. The mind and body, no matter how ravaged, still need sleep, and they'll take it — if you let them.
This new report goes against what the NHS says , which claims that as well as putting people at risk of obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes, that insomnia shortens life expectancy.
But for people who are struggling with insomnia, long-term concerns about life spans aren't what's troubling them - often they're just trying to make it to the end of the day. All I could think about next day in work was that I needed to get through the day. It's not easy to beat insomnia alone, but there are things you can do to improve your chances of getting a better night's sleep. The NHS recommends things like exercising to tire yourself out during the day and cutting down on caffeine.
It also says smoking, eating too much or drinking alcohol late at night can stop you from sleeping well. Other recommendations include writing a list of things that are playing on your mind and trying to get to bed at a similar time every night.
On a good night Almara says she might get six hours sleep - but wakes up constantly through the night due to worry and stress, which is having an impact on her life. So for instance, I'm less inclined to hang out with friends - which is of course good for your mental health," she says.
When asked whether she's worried about the impact of insomnia on her long-term health, Almara says she is just "hoping it won't last".
Lack of sleep for Almara has become normal in her day-to-day life - and other insomnia sufferers agree. I said you don't need to be sad, this is something I've had my whole life and it's just now part of my routine. Ryan says a turbulent childhood left him unable to sleep and like Almara, he wakes up constantly during the night.
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