Many patients with insomnia ask me repeatedly, “Doctor, can I get well from this disease? How long will it take to get better?” . This question will make me struggle, why would I struggle? Because sleep is a very natural and natural thing, and even if you have insomnia, it can be cured by medical means. But why there are so many insomnia patients in the clinic, I think part of the problem is the current medical environment, another part is related to the insomnia patients themselves. Very often, insomnia patients are so eager to regain their previous good sleep that they seek medical advice everywhere and follow any doctor or medicine that they hear is good, unable to adhere to systematic treatment, which actually prolongs the course of insomnia. In addition, patients with insomnia will simply seek help from doctors and resort to drugs or even alcohol for a long time, without making lifestyle and mindset adjustments from themselves, ignoring the causes of insomnia and their own ability to recover from sleep, which will make it difficult for you to stop using the drugs and make the condition prolonged and difficult to heal. Before you read this article, have you ever seriously thought, “Why do I have insomnia?” How can I help myself?” . I think that many people should not have thought about it. If you understand the reasons for your insomnia and know what you should and should not do, I think this will play a key role in your recovery. Now, let’s really understand the cause of your condition. There is a so-called “three-factor model” for the cause of insomnia, which is a susceptibility factor, a trigger factor and a maintenance factor. For example, if you have a number of relatives with insomnia, if you have a perfect and anxious personality and care about other people’s opinions, if you are prone to waking up and dreaming since birth, or if women have irregular menstruation since childhood, your chances of suffering from insomnia are much higher than other people, and it may take you longer to treat, in the words of Chinese medicine “congenital deficiency”. In outpatient clinics I ask patients what the cause of your first insomnia was, and a lot of patients mention stress from high school exams, interviews, childbirth, illness, changes in work and life, etc. These are the triggering factors that led to your insomnia. If these triggering factors still exist, then we should focus on working on these triggering factors instead of just giving tranquilizing herbs, sedative hypnotics, etc. However, you may ask, “I’ve experienced all of this in the past, and now I don’t have any of these aspects, so why do I still have insomnia?” . Here, it involves the maintenance factor, I think you can discuss the following points to be more clear. 1, the physical problem: the physical is a relatively stable inherent trait formed on the basis of innate endowment and acquired, that is, we often mention the blood deficiency physique, qi-depression physique, phlegm-damp physique, etc. This trait determines what disease we are prone to, how effective the treatment of this disease. In addition to the innate endowment we can not decide, we can adjust the acquired factors, Chinese medicine why insomnia treatment is effective for a large part of the reason I think is for the physical conditioning. Unfortunately, in the process of conditioning, many insomnia patients do not pay attention to the adjustment of acquired factors, especially the relatively fixed habits of living, eating habits, coping patterns of life, such as: long-term late night and overtime, cold and fatty diet, multiple abortions for women, excessive physical activity, frequent sexual life, etc., which will lead to the doctor here to help you regulate your body, while your poor lifestyle leads to the physique This will further deteriorate the clinical efficacy. In addition, the physical conditioning of Chinese medicine requires a longer period of time to be effective, patients see an improvement after not adhering to treatment will also make the condition easy to repeat. 2, poor coping strategies: insomnia patients in order to cope with the initial occurrence of insomnia, often in order to get more sleep and adopt what they think is the “right” coping strategy, these will lead to the existence of insomnia and accompanied by anxiety, fear, depression and other psychological changes to insomnia, if this intervention is not timely, it will let the transient insomnia If intervention is not timely, transient insomnia can become chronic insomnia. Poor coping strategies for insomnia patients include going to bed early to prepare for sleep, lying in bed for long periods of time even when you can’t sleep, and trying to get more sleep during the day to make up for the lack of sleep at night. One of the simplest examples is when you are watching TV in the living room and want to sleep, so you rush to your room to sleep, lie in bed, and suddenly the sleepiness disappears, then you toss and turn in bed, and the more you want to sleep, the less you can sleep. This is actually too long with your time in bed, the bed has allowed you to form a “sleepless” conditioned reflex, but unfortunately many people do not know, desperately early to sleep, prolong the time in bed, which leads to more sleepless. Therefore, we need to manage for these poor coping strategies. 3, too much anxiety and fear of insomnia: insomnia patients often overstate the short-term and long-term effects of insomnia, especially on their daytime function and physical health, that insomnia is the only culprit to make their daytime mental ill health, reduced work efficiency, and so on, and then think that as long as you can sleep well, all problems will be solved, all day long will focus on how to “ensure The patient’s expectations of sleep increase as he or she becomes more and more sleepy. As the patient’s expectation of sleep increases, the fear of insomnia increases, and the more nervous and fearful the patient becomes, the more difficult it is to sleep, thus causing the patient to enter a vicious cycle of “insomnia, fear of insomnia, and increased insomnia”, which is difficult to cure in the long run. This pattern reminds us to deal with the anxiety and fear, you can try some yoga or relaxation training to relieve emotions and help sleep. It can even be treated with a combination of antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications to quickly control the symptoms and then slowly reduce the medication under the guidance of a doctor. Insomnia is caused by a combination of factors, such as susceptibility factors, triggering factors, and maintenance factors, which determines that our treatment is comprehensive, rather than relying solely on sedative-hypnotic drugs, antidepressants, Chinese medicine, etc. Here, I advocate the “double expert” model, in which the doctor is the expert on the disease and the patient is the expert who knows himself best. The doctor is the expert of the disease and the patient is the expert who knows himself best. Through the joint efforts of the doctor and the patient, we can deal with the causes of insomnia, poor lifestyle and bad emotions. In this way, insomnia can be better treated and its recurrence can be better prevented.