Insomnia

What is insomnia?

Insomnia is the complaint of inadequate or poor quality sleep that interferes with normal daytime functioning.

For some people, insomnia means difficulty in falling asleep or waking up frequently during the night with problems getting back to sleep. For others, it is waking up too early in the morning and/or experiencing unrefreshing sleep. It can be transient or chronic.

Everyone has a rough night or two, or short-term (transient) insomnia. Chronic insomnia, though, lasts for more than a month.

What are the types of sleep?

Sleep is essential for health providing rest and restoration for the mind and body. It is the regular period in every 24 hours when we are unconscious and unaware of our surroundings. There are two main types of sleep:

• Non-REM sleep
  The brain is quiet, but the body may move around. Hormones are released into the bloodstream and our body repairs itself after the wear and tear of the day.
• Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep
  It comes and goes throughout the night and makes up about onefifth of our sleep time. During REM sleep, our brain is very active, our muscles are very relaxed, our eyes move quickly from side to side and we dream.

We move between REM and non-REM sleep about five times throughout the night, dreaming more as we get towards the morning.

During a normal night, we will also have short periods of waking. These last one or two minutes and happen every two hours or so. We are not usually aware of them. We are more likely to remember them if we feel anxious or if there is something else going on - noises outside, our partner snoring etc.