When sleeping, your body releases cytokines, which are small proteins that help your body fight exhaustion, trauma, or a disease. That is why various studies show that regular quality and sufficient sleep minimizes your risk of diabetic-like conditions and poor cardiovascular health and improves your memory and performance. However, due to your life’s stressful nature, you may have a sleep disorder. One common sleep disorder that Bridgewater Respacare deals with is insomnia. Insomnia affects almost 70 million Americans every year. Also, about 33% to 50% of adults experience insomnia signs and symptoms.
If you have insomnia, you will not fall asleep quickly, have trouble staying asleep, or find yourself waking up too early, making it harder to resume sleeping. Other symptoms you may have include feeling tired after waking up, poor ability to focus, and low concentration levels. Consequently, below are the different types of insomnia.
Acute insomnia
The symptoms of acute or short-term insomnia that you experience, like trouble sleeping, occur briefly. Short-term difficulty sleeping may emanate from continued or discontinued drug use or a recent stressful event, such as losing a person you love, having a perturbing medical diagnosis, or having relationship issues.
The sleep disorder lasts a few weeks or months. Acute insomnia symptoms will gradually disappear as you cope with the cause.
Acute insomnia often affects women more than men and may arise when a woman is pregnant or has reached the menopausal stage.
Chronic Insomnia
Your doctor will consider you to have this particular chronic sleeping disorder when you have difficulty falling or staying asleep for a minimum of three nights every week for more than three months. The sleeping trouble may constantly exist or stop and reappear after some time.
Like acute insomnia, chronic insomnia also results from stressful events or situations. However, eternal trouble sleeping may also be due to medications, neurological issues, physical pain, mental illnesses, and unhealthy lifestyle choices.
Some unhealthy lifestyle choices that may make you have chronic insomnia include regular excessive screen time, a late afternoon nap, the use of alcoholic drinks and caffeine, and late sleeping.
Your sleeping issue may also arise as a side effect of using medication for a health condition. Drugs for treating asthma, blood pressure, and depression can make you have difficulty falling or staying asleep. Even more damaging is the fact that the drugs can make you sleepy during the day, negatively impacting your sleeping schedule at night.
This chronic sleeping disorder is also more prevalent in women.
Apart from categorizing insomnia as acute or chronic, researchers have also come up with other categorizations. That enables enhanced classification and analysis of the different ways you can experience insomnia.
Other ways of describing the sleep disorder include:
- Sleep onset insomnia: Refers to trouble falling asleep when the night starts. Therefore, you often toss and turn a lot in search of sleep.
- Maintenance insomnia: Refers to difficulty staying asleep; you will wake up more than once in the middle of the night and fail to fall asleep.
- Secondary insomnia: Arises from physical pain and illnesses such as restless leg syndrome, GERD, and obstructive sleep apnea.
Contact Respacare today to schedule an appointment for professional diagnosis and treatment of your sleep disorder.
