I. The concept of insomnia
Insomnia is a condition of unsatisfactory quality and/or quantity of sleep that lasts for a considerable period of time, often manifested as difficulty falling asleep, inability to fall asleep, difficulty maintaining sleep, and premature or intermittent awakening resulting in sleep deprivation. Insomnia is one of the most common sleep disorders, and almost everyone has experienced insomnia. With the development of society and the accelerated pace of life, the incidence of insomnia is on the rise. According to statistics, about 30% of adults suffer from insomnia.
How much sleep is normal for a person every day? It varies with age: most newborns sleep about 14 to 18 hours a day; children around 10 years old sleep 9 to 10 hours; 2/3 adults sleep 7 to 8 hours a night; 1/5 adults sleep less than 6 hours, and elderly people sleep 6.5 hours a night on average. According to Japanese research, it is best to sleep for about 7 hours a day.
What are the manifestations of insomnia?
The performance of insomnia mainly includes the following: ① difficulty in falling asleep; ② inability to fall asleep; ③ waking up early and not being able to fall back to sleep after waking up; ④ frequently waking up from nightmares and feeling that they have been having nightmares all night; ⑤ not recovering energy after sleeping; ⑥ the onset of insomnia can be long or short, with the short ones getting better in a few days and the long ones lasting for several days.
Second, the common causes of insomnia are.
1, psychological factors: anxiety, depression, tension, excitement, anger or excessive thinking caused by various conflicts and difficulties in life and work can cause insomnia. At present, there are five types of psychological causes of insomnia are recognized by the psychological community.
Fear of insomnia
Many insomnia patients have “insomnia characteristic anxiety”, once they go to bed at night, they worry about not being able to sleep, or try their best to get to sleep, which is counterproductive.
The higher neural activity of the human cerebral cortex has two processes: excitation and inhibition. During the day, brain cells are in a state of excitement. After a day of work, they need to rest and enter the inhibited state and sleep, and then naturally turn awake after a night of rest.
The excitation and inhibition of the cerebral cortex are coordinated with each other, alternating to form a rhythm of sleep from week to week. The idea of “fearing insomnia and wanting to sleep” is to sleep, but the idea of “fearing insomnia and wanting to sleep” is itself a process of excitement of brain cells, so the more afraid of insomnia and the more you want to sleep, the more excited your brain cells are, and therefore the more insomnia.
Dreams are psychologically harmful
Many people who claim to have insomnia, can not correctly view the dream, that the dream is the performance of poor sleep, harmful to the human body, and even some people mistakenly believe that more dreams is insomnia. These misconceptions often make people anxious, worried that after going to sleep will dream again, this “vigilance” psychology, often affecting the quality of sleep.
In fact, science has proved that everyone dreams, dreaming is not only a normal psychological phenomenon, but also a way of working of the brain, reenacting daytime experiences in dreams, which helps memory and clean up the useless information. Dreams themselves are not harmful to the human body. What is harmful is the psychology that “dreaming is harmful”, which makes you have a psychological burden.
Self-blame
Some people feel guilty and blame themselves after a mistake, replaying the mistake in their minds and regretting that they did not handle it properly. During the day, because there are many things to do, the self-blame and remorse is a little lighter, and at night, they “wander” in the fantasy and excitement of self-blame and remorse, and have a long time to sleep.
Expectation psychology
It means that people look forward to someone or do something and worry about oversleeping and missing things, so they often wake up early. For example, a “three-shift” webmaster, due to the night shift (12:00 at night to work), often at 7:00 p.m. to go to bed, for fear of being late, sleep is not solid, often only 1-2 hours of sleep, was awakened, a long time will become early awakening patients. There are also people in the promotion, title assessment, rooming results are about to be announced, often also in a state of anticipatory excitement, it is difficult to sleep.
2, physiological factors: mental tension, hunger, fatigue, sexual excitement and some diseases, such as arthritis, ulcer disease, angina, migraine, asthma, arrhythmia, etc. can cause insomnia. As age rises, the sleep effect can also change and cause insomnia. Those with thalamic lesions can show inversion of sleep rhythm, i.e. sleep during the day and no sleep at night when awake. Excessive mental stress. This is the most common cause. Many people with chronic insomnia are considered to be overstressed and with complaints, the slightest discomfort that is very sensitive, not easy to relax; or overthinking, heart labor day clumsy; or due to intense mental conflict too excited, excited.
3, abuse of sleeping pills or stimulants: alcohol, drug abuse, drug dependence and withdrawal symptoms can cause insomnia. Common drugs are stimulants, sedatives, thyroxine, birth control pills, anti-arrhythmic drugs, etc.
4, unhealthy lifestyle. Irregular life, high-intensity mental work, physical activity is too little. Long-term sitting office workers are most likely to suffer from insomnia.
5, diet factors. Eat too much or hunger before bed; drink strong tea, coffee or other excitatory drinks before bed.
6, sleep environment factors. Sleep with bright light, noise; bedroom temperature is too high or too low; harassment of blood-sucking insects; uncomfortable beds, bedding; lack of security for the sleep environment such as the fear of natural disasters, fear of ghosts and gods.
7. Holding incorrect attitude towards sleep. If you think that you must have 8 hours of sleep every night, when you do not have enough sleep, you will worry about not having enough sleep, lest you sleep too little to affect your body, causing mental tension, you can not sleep more, so that the vicious circle.