Lack of sleep

Archive for December, 2008

Many children ages from two to six do not fall asleep promptly after going to bed, and they end up suffering from lack of sleep. The child may be too tired or wrought up to sleep. Romping before bedtime or too strenuous or exciting play may be the cause. Maybe the child didn’t have his afternoon nap. Read the rest of this entry »

There are various behavioral techniques that promise to treat lack of sleep, such as relaxation therapy, sleep restriction therapy and reconditioning. Here is a brief overview of these three techniques. Read the rest of this entry »

100 million Americans suffer from a lack of sleep each year.

LACK OF SLEEP – - A Chinese herbal prescription.
You don’t know how much you’re missing if you cannot sleep well, because sleep is the simplest pleasure of life. The lack of sleep also affects other simple pleasures like eating and energetic activities. Consequently, treating your sleep problem should be a high priority.

Topic: lack of sleep

General purpose: To inform

Specific purpose: To inform my audience how lack of sleep can cause accidents, some of the physical, and emotional effects.

By: Zeke Dymen

If you usually sleep only a few hours a night, it doesn’t mean that you have a lack of sleep. People usually vary in their need for sleep. Insomnia may cause problems during the day, such as tiredness, a lack of energy, difficulty concentrating, and irritability.

There are certain conditions which seem to make people more likely to experience a lack of sleep, among others:

• old age (insomnia occurs more frequently in those over age 60)
• women
• people with a history of depression

Take these and add to them stress, anxiety, a medical problem, or the use of certain medications, and you have a ready made recipe for lack of sleep.

By themselves there are many direct causes of a person experiencing transient (for a short period of time_ and intermittent (on and off) lack of sleep.

• stress
• environmental noise
• extreme temperature
• change in the surrounding environment
• sleep/wake schedule problems such as those due to jet lag
• medication side effects

If you’re having a chronic insomnia, the causes are more complex, resulting from a mix of factors including some physical or mental disorders, such as depression.

Other underlying causes include arthritis, kidney disease, heart failure, asthma, sleep apnea, narcolepsy, restless legs
syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, and hyperthyroidism. However, chronic lack of sleep, or insomnia, may also be due to behavioral factors, such as misuse of caffeine, alcohol, or other substances; disrupted sleep/wake cycles as may
occur with shift work or other nighttime activity schedules; and chronic stress.

There are some additional behaviours that enforce the lack of sleep symptoms in people, such as:

• expecting to have difficulty sleeping and worrying about it
• ingesting excessive amounts caffeine
• drinking alcohol before bedtime
• smoking cigarettes before bedtime
• excessive napping in the afternoon or evening
• irregular or continually disrupted sleep/wake schedules

As you can see, these behaviors may prolong existing lack of sleep, and they can also be responsible for causing the sleeping problem in the first place. As I mentioned before, stopping these behaviors may eliminate your lack of sleep altogether.

Sleep & Your Mental Health

1 new study published in Scientific America found that a lack of sleep can actually cause psychiatric symptoms and disorders. Do you have a mental illness or just a lack of sleep? Lack of sleep can cause emotional problems, irritability, depression, hallucination (dreaming while awake) and paranoia (as in schizophrenia), emotions instability (such as bipolar and personality disorders).

There is no doubt that ever since the introduction of the industrial revolution, stress has increased tremendously, and sleep has directly proportional decreased with it. But what is lack of sleep? Simply put, lack of sleep is insomnia.

The only difference is that when you think of the term ‘lack of sleep’, you think of overworking, stress, and something that you can catch up on later. When you think of insomnia, on the other hand, you think of a disorder that needs to be treated. However think again, lack of sleep, is insomnia. When you can’t sleep, when you can’t get enough sleep,  you have a lack of sleep, or insomnia. Both are a condition in which you are not able to sleep properly, where you have a hard time falling asleep and also have difficulty in remaining asleep.

So now that you know that insomnia is simply lack of sleep, maybe you start treating it less as a disease and more as something that you can do about it rather easily. You will see that lack of sleep is more a bad habit than anything else. The fact that you cannot fall asleep is the result of several things that either you shouldn’t be doing that you’re doing, or vice versa, you should be doing which you don’t.
Some of the questions people ask related to lack of sleep are: does lack of sleep make me fat? what are the symptoms of insomnia? will I die from lack of sleep? Does lack of sleep cause headaches? Can I cure my lack of sleep? We will discuss all these and more on this site.