Insomnia can be harmful in many ways. The most common ones are agitation, fatigue and decreased memory and concentration. Long-term insomnia can lead to a decrease in body immunity, plant nerve disorders, and susceptibility to a variety of physical and psychological diseases. Therefore, insomnia should be actively prevented and treated.
I. What is insomnia
Insomnia usually refers to a subjective experience that the patient is not satisfied with the time and/or quality of sleep and that it affects the social function during the day. Generally speaking, insomnia is defined as the inability to fall asleep even after half an hour of going to bed, less than 6 hours of sleep per night, shallow sleep, dreaminess, easy to wake up at night or often waking up more than an hour earlier than usual, resulting in poor mental performance during the day and affecting life and work.
Second, the causes of insomnia
There are many reasons for insomnia, the common ones are.
1, psychological factors, unpleasant events in life and work cause anxiety, depression, and excessive concern for healthy sleep conditions.
2, environmental factors, noisy environment, crowded living or sudden change of sleep environment, etc.
3, changes in sleep rhythms, changes in the rhythm of the biological clock caused by frequent changes in night and day shifts, etc.
4. drug and food factors, alcohol, coffee, tea, drug dependence or withdrawal symptoms.
5, somatic discomfort caused by various diseases, such as pain, itching, cough, nocturia, etc.
6, psychopathic disorders, most of which are accompanied by sleep disorders.
7, personality traits, bad sleep habits since childhood and genetics and other factors are also causes of insomnia.
Third, the prevention and treatment of insomnia
1.Actively search for and analyze the causes of insomnia and lift them in time. If it is secondary to physical, psychological and mental diseases, we should actively carry out the treatment of the original disease.
2.Establish good sleep hygiene habits.
(1) Develop the habit of waking up regularly, even on holidays, and gradually establish your own sleep biorhythm.
(2) Avoid napping or taking long naps, increase daytime physical activities, avoid excitatory drinks before bedtime, and improve the quality of sleep at night.
(3) Optimize the sleep environment to avoid uncomfortable stimuli.
(4) Try not to bring the stress of work and worries of life to sleep.
(5) Sleep restriction when necessary, with the aim of improving sleep efficiency by reducing the time spent in bed.
3.Correction of unreasonable sleep cognition: Patients with insomnia often have biased sleep cognition and are overly concerned about sleep or overly fearful of insomnia, which puts patients in a vicious cycle of insomnia-anxiety and fear-aggravation of insomnia, so it is also very important to correct the mentality of excessive concern about sleep.
4, relaxation therapy: according to certain practice procedures, learn to consciously control or regulate their own mental and physiological activities in order to reduce the level of arousal of the body. Commonly used relaxation therapies include progressive relaxation training, autonomy training, biofeedback therapy, etc.
5.Allopathic treatment
Currently, the US FDA approved sedative drugs include benzodiazepines, non-benzodiazepines and melatonin receptor agonists. Compared with benzodiazepines, the new non-benzodiazepines selectively act on the w1 receptor of the GABA-A complex receptor and have only a single hypnotic effect, without muscle relaxation and anticonvulsant effects, without affecting the normal sleep structure, and less likely to cause drug It does not affect the normal sleep structure and is less likely to cause drug dependence and addiction risk. Commonly used drugs include zolpidem, zaleplon, zopiclone, etc. At present, the concept of “on-demand treatment” has been developed for the pharmacological treatment of insomnia, in which patients take sedative drugs as needed under the guidance of a physician.
Because of the various causes of insomnia and individual differences, the treatment of insomnia should emphasize individualization and choose comprehensive treatment measures according to different conditions.