How Do I Know I’m An Insomniac?
Millions of us don’t sleep well, but have no idea whether we have insomnia or not, and therefore whether we should make an effort to resolve it, or struggle on hoping for a better night’s sleep tonight again.
What is insomnia?
Insomnia is not being able to sleep normally, by which I mean not being able to have an extended period of uninterrupted sleep that leaves you refreshed. It’s finding sleep a struggle, instead of something that comes naturally. Though insomniacs can spend whole nights awake, this does not mean no sleep.
Insomnia is a state of being seriously sleepless to the extent that it impacts negatively on your waking life; for many of us, not sleeping well dominates our lives. Whether you experience insomnia most of the time or only intermittently, it feels the same and sets off the same vicious circle.
It’s important to realize from the outset, too, that though countless books have been written on the subject, despite the impression given insomnia can’t be neatly pigeon-holed. Its causes and the way it expresses itself are too varied to bear absolute generalization.
They said, working out whether you are officially an insomniac is easy. In a nutshell, if you can’t fall asleep or stay asleep, can’t get back to sleep, and feel deprived of the benefits of sleep, you’re an insomniac.
The three prime symptoms of insomnia recognized by sleep scientists are:
- Difficulty getting off to sleep (sleep-onset insomnia): Normal sleepers take anywhere from 1-20 minutes to fall asleep. Insomniacs habitually take longer: 30 minutes and upwards, the average time bring about 1hours 15 minutes. Moreover, we can find it extremely difficult to get to sleep irrespective of how tired we are, or how little sleep we may have had the previous nights. If your insomnia is confined to not being able to fall asleep, the cause (or one of them) is likely to be that your body clock is running too late.
- Persistent waking up (sleep-maintenance insomnia): During the course of normal sleep, everyone wakes up momentarily but we are not aware of this, so sleep seems unbroken. It’s quite natural, too, to wake up if you’re too hot or too cold, need to visit the bathroom, there’s a dog barking, you’ve got a plane to catch, an important exam the next morning, etc. For an insomniac, however, waking up, and the inevitable tossing and turning and frustration because we can’t get back to sleep, is the norm. For some of us, myself included, we can either be awake for hours, or we can wake so often that sleep seems like an extended period of short naps and a perpetual state of being half-awake and never quite asleep. Sleep scientists reckon that being awake for 30 minutes or more during the night is enough to qualify for sleep-maintenance insomnia; again, the average is about 1 hour 15 minutes
- Early morning waking: Waking up early is not a symptom of insomnia. Millions of larks, and people who have a good night’s sleep, do so daily. Millions of people, too, choose to get up early and generally compensate by going to bed earlier than most of us. Waking early and not being able to go back to sleep as the norm, however, after sleep-deprived nights, and persistently waking up earlier than you feel you need, are symptoms of insomnia. If your insomnia is confined to persistently waking up earlier, two common causes are depression or a body clock that is running too early.
If you experience any, all or any combination of the three symptoms above, you have insomnia. In the US, to ‘qualify as an insomniac you must typically take at least 30 minutes to fall asleep, sleep fewer than six hours and/or wake up frequently, though increasingly sleep doctors rely more on the subjective diagnosis of the patient.
If the symptoms are temporary and lasting less than a month, due to whatever cause don’t be unduly concerned, though do make an effort to do the simple things outlined in Part 3 to help you sleep better and restore your natural sleep patterns sooner. If your symptoms persist for more than a month, you qualify, medically speaking, as a chronic insomniac and you must do something about it.
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