If you have found it almost impossible to get any sleep lately and believe that you are suffering from insomnia then it is always a good idea to consult your physician. You have to understand that insomnia is not a disease so there is no cures for it, however there are some temporary fixes. Most importantly your doctor will want to do an examination on you and likely screen your medication, if you take any. The doctor should check for things such as thyroid conditions. He may also like for you to keep a log of your sleep patterns over a period of maybe one or two weeks and then discuss it with you. Further, he will likely check to see if your insomnia is related to or causing anxiety or depression.

The doctor knows that if there is an underlying condition that is causing the insomnia then if he can diagnosis and treat that cause, he will likely relieve the insomnia too. In doctor terms there is primary and secondary insomnia. The difference is that with primary insomnia is that there is no medical condition causing it and secondary insomnia is because there is an underlying health concern. The doctor may also refer you to a sleep treatment center for further evaluation.

The sleep treatment center will perform multiple tests on you while you are there and you should expect an overnight stay too. The will likely conduct a Multiple Sleep Latency Test (MSLT), a Maintenance of Wakefulness Test (MWT), an Actigraphy, and some lab tests to check for anything including those to test for medicines known to affect one’s level of alertness, such as stimulants, opiates, and antianxiety medicines. The sleep study can help your doctor make a diagnosis and guide treatment by providing information on everything from body position and blood oxygen levels to heart rate and eye movements.

Sometimes the tests turn up nothing and you might find that you were just suffering from some anxiety due to an upcoming event or maybe you are depressed over some major event. Now medication can alleviate those problems which again, might just take care of the insomnia too. Insomnia can be tricky and it can take a while to hit the nail on the head and find out exactly what the problem is. First it must be determined if the anxiety is chronic or not.

Chronic meaning the insomnia has been consistently present for over one month. Then doctors will want to know if the insomnia is primary, secondary, or maybe even idiopathic, which means that there is no physical, mental, or emotional reason for the insomnia. This is why it is so important to go through the entire medical process to find out why this abnormal sleep pattern is continuing.

What makes this a most delicate situation is that insomnia is not a disease but a condition and therefore there are no specific tests that can explain the cause but rather a series of teats that eliminate one reason after another.

Many people believe that a few drinks will help them to sleep better when in fact it will help a person fall asleep but it will not help to keep them asleep. Way too often those few nightcaps can cause a person to wake several times during the night and further lead to feeling sluggish, disorientated, and have a lack of concentration the next day. Unfortunately, this can lead to a very unhealthy pattern. Contrary to what many might think alcohol and insomnia do not mix at all. Alcohol causes the body to dehydrate which can make insomnia even worse.

Alcohol is also a contributing factor in keeping people out of the deep sleep cycle which makes them feel even worse the next day. So this is how alcohol and insomnia work, alcohol makes the body fall asleep very quickly while at the same time it is dehydrating your body too. As a result, the body will wake for water because of the dehydration and your body will never get a chance to fall into the REM cycle of sleep, which is the deep important sleep that all people need. No alcohol will ever alleviate a person’s insomnia but in fact will make it worse. It is certainly no trade off to become a person with a drinking problem attempting to compensate for an insomnia condition.

There are many more effective ways to treat insomnia without tipping back a few drinks. You have to figure out what is causing the insomnia which can be attempted to be done by ones self but will likely have to be defined by a doctor. The doctor can evaluate all of the causes and get into more depth of what could be the underlying cause of the insomnia, the treating it with the appropriate measures that are not related to drinking alcohol in a failed attempt to mask the problem of insomnia. Remember that drinking will never help you get a quality nights sleep but what it will do is cause the problem to worsen and the next day in addition to feeling fatigued and lethargic, you will have additional discomfort from the alcohol.

Alcohol and its effects on insomnia might be one of the biggest misconceptions ever. Maybe that is because while a few drinks might actually induce sleep and make one fall asleep faster it is almost as if the sleep that they are getting does not count. It is not the right level of sleep and with the other factors of alcohol mixed in; technically one might as well have stayed up all night in terms of the body.

In other words the sleep did not benefit the body or mind at all. As a matter of fact, most people who have a dependency on alcohol have frequent sleep disruptions, even after the discontinuation of use. Beyond any withdrawal period a persons sleep patterns could very well never return to normal and as a result they may indeed have to battle frequent battles with insomnia for the rest of their lives.

The process of falling asleep isn’t one of the things that science knows a lot about. The act of simply becoming unconscious is not easily explained. Yet, all humans sleep. The average number of hours required for a human adult is said to be eight hours….the actual average is 7.75 hours, but eight is close enough. Now every adult human does not require the prescribed eight hours of sleep. Some require more than eight hours of sleep and some require less. Eight is the AVERAGE.

There are only a few things that researchers have determined that are required for humans to fall asleep. The most important factor of natural sleep for all human beings is calmness. People who are agitated, excited, angry, frightened, stressed, or tense will not fall asleep easily, nor will they stay asleep long enough. Sometimes those who are depressed will suffer from insomnia, but others who suffer from depression might sleep 20 hours a day, so depression is not always a cause of insomnia.

It is obvious that if we want to enjoy a good night of rest and all of the advantages that a good night of rest can provide for us, then we all need to pursue calmness before we try to sleep. The question, then, is what promotes calmness (?), not what promotes sleep (?).

Believe it or not, one of the best things to promote calmness is exercise…vigorous exercise. Now, this vigorous exercise should not be engaged in anywhere near the time that you want to sleep, because during and immediately following vigorous exercise, excitement rather than calmness is the effect. However, about four hours after vigorous exercise, the blood pressure drops and the heart rate slows. Calmness descends.

Most people believe that exercise should be done in the early morning hours, but for the purpose of promoting the calmness needed for sleep, exercise is best done in the late afternoon or early evening hours.