INSOMNIA

What is insomnia? Actually, it is not a desease nor diagnosis. Instead, it is just a word indicating the poor quality or too limited amount of sleep.
Some people treat their insomnia with sleeping pills. It is, however, not the best treatment for the problem because it does not addressed the underlying causes. Furthermore, some cause insomnia are actually made worse by the administration of sleeping pills. Also, cronic use of sleeping pills can perpetuate insomnia and may result in addiction. In the United States, for example, sleeping pills are the major cause of insomnia.
Basically, there are three types of insomnia
The firs is inability to fall a sleep initialy, lying fully awake until sleep finally occurs.
Since people can tell what happening to them they are fully awake, doctors usually can sort out the cause of this difficulty simply by talking with the patient.
Possible specific factors include restless legs syndrome, psychophysiological insomnia, inadequate sleep hygiene, adjustment sleep disorder, chronic use sleep of sleeping pills, stimultans or alcohol, physical disconfort, anxiety and mood disorder, and delayed slelep phase syndrome.
The second type is waking up too early with inability to return to sleep.

This symptom can be due to depression, which if present should prompt consultation with a mental health professional. However, this type of insomnia also can result from many other possible factors that can remain hidden and escape recognition, due their occurrence in sleep. Evaluation by sleep medicine specialist may be needed to get at the underlying cause.
The last is difficulty in a sleep due to repeatd 'dozing and arousing', or sleep that is too 'light' and/or fragmented by repeated awakenings. There are many possible madical and physical cause for this group of problem -and some of these causes are potentially serious! Also, it often is impossible to identify these causes by history alone, since most abnormal sleep events that provoke arousals are 'over with' by the time the person in fully awake, leaving no clues as to their nature!