An individual predisposition to insomnia can have a huge impact. Insomnia is affected by three kinds of factors: predisposing, precipitating and perpetuating. The predisposing factors are a genetic predisposition and personality traits. They cause a person to be much more prone to agitation and anxiety in response to a wide range of situations, which affects sleep. Personality traits, in this case, include higher emotional reactivity, sensitivity, excessive worrying, pondering the past. Such people tend to be agitated and tense more often than others. If you have such predisposition and precipitating triggers occur, such as stressful life events, you may experience sleep disturbance. This may be short-tern insomnia, which is a very sound response to stress. Once the trigger weakens or ceases, your sleep should return to normal. But sometimes, short-term insomnia will transform into a chronic disorder. This is caused by perpetuating factors: things we usually do before we go to bed, when we can’t sleep: watching TV in your bed, drinking alcohol or spending more time in spent in bed due to going to bed early and waiting until you finally fall asleep.
This disastrous strategy makes your sleeping problems permanent. Your sleep becomes shallower, you wake up in the middle of the night more often, and you stop associating your bed with sleeping. The more you think about being unable to asleep and wait for the sleep to come, the more difficult it is to actually fall asleep. You start experiencing concerns and anxiety about the situation and its consequences, its adverse impacts on your performance and health, falling into a vicious cycle of negative thoughts, which makes you even more agitated, and this, in turn, aggravates your insomnia. The cycle begins again.
Unfortunately, there is little we can do about the predisposing and precipitating factors. However, we can work on our attitude, thinking and habits – the perpetuating factors. That’s where the focus should be. Insomnia affects more and more people. It is one of the most common mental health problems.
People suffering from insomnia are very often concerned about their health. Poor sleep quality is obviously a risk factor for many diseases, such as heart attack, diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, it increases depressive tendencies, affects your mood and social functioning and increases the likelihood of road accidents. Dangerous health effects occur mainly in patients who do not adhere to treatment, remain affected for a long time and are passive towards their insomnia.
The use of perpetuating factors, such as alcohol, is also common. This, in turn, may lead to more problems. We should also remember that excessive worrying triggers a vicious cycle of thinking, anxiety and fear, putting your body in a state of agitation, which makes your insomnia worse. Overthinking is no good at all, you should focus on the possible causes of insomnia and what you can do to regain control of your sleep.
Therapy with a licensed psychotherapist is a useful tool to address the perpetuating factors.
Symptoms of insomnia occur in a range of mental disorders and physical diseases. Patients suffering from anxiety disorders have trouble falling asleep and wake up in the middle of the night, early morning awakenings are common in depression, and during manic phases of the bipolar disorder the sleep is very short. In diseases which cause pain, patients very often wake up during the night. These causes of insomnia do not have to lead to chronic insomnia. In some cases, chronic insomnia is accompanied by another mental disorder. To check yourself against the criteria for insomnia or other sleep disturbances, you should see a sleep medicine doctor. If you are concerned that you might have another disorder, you should consider seeing a psychiatrist.
