When you sleep badly, there are several common causes of chronic insomnia that could have resulted in sleep disorder. These insomnia causes can be classified under psychological or habitual.
Psychological Causes of Chronic Insomnia
Depression – When you feel depressed, you may not necessarily have difficulty falling asleep. The thing is, you tend to quickly fall into REM sleep.
Intense activation of REM sleep in this manner may lead to over-consolidation of negative memory, making you overly prone to remembering painful feelings and events. When that happens, you could wake up suddenly a few times in the mid of your sleep. Consequently, you obtain poor quality sleep.
In addition, your undertaking of antidepressant drugs (such as fluoxetine, paroxetine, sertraline and citalopram) may disrupt your normal sleep cycle and hence, aggravate your insomnia.
Stress – It can cause acute insomnia when you have a deadline to meet. However, such sleep disorder will go away by itself once you’re done with the project or assignment. It can also develop into chronic condition if your stress persists over time due to massive workload.
Anxiety – This often goes hand in hand with stress. You may be worrying unduly about what’s going to happen the following day if you cannot hit sales target or meet deadlines. You get edgy over small things. Not being able to relax and put down the thoughts can easily result in insomnia.
There are many other psychological triggers for insomnia such as bipolar disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, panic attack, fear etc. Being overly excited can cause insomnia too. For instance, you strike lottery and win millions of dollars overnight. This could make you go sleepless for few nights. On some cases, winners lost their sleep for months until they’re diagnosed with chronic insomnia.
Habitual Causes of Chronic Insomnia
Late Night Supper – People in general thought that having a meal before bedtime will help improve sleep. It happens otherwise, most of the time. Some people, no matter how much they have eaten at dinner, have already developed a habit of eating supper. Chemical reactions occurring in your stomach can disrupt your sleep-inducing hormones, serotonin and melatonin, causing sleep problem as a consequence. You keep to this late night habit, you’ll have chronic insomnia.
Poor Diet – Taking too much alcohol or caffeinated drinks can disturb your sleep-inducing hormones. Poor nutritional intake is also one crucial factor since you need tons of beneficial nutrients from fruits, vegetables and other plant foods to help improve your sleep mechanism.
Irregular Bedtime – Yesterday you slept at 12 midnight, tonight you sleep at 1 A.M., tomorrow you’ll sleep at 2 A.M. Such irregular pattern of bedtime can mess up your circadian rhythm, causing your biological clock to go awry.
Lack of Exercise – Same as obtaining quality nutrients from food, our body needs some forms of exercises to help strengthen the functions of our internal organs so as to improve and maintain a normal sleep mechanism. When you don’t exercise, you won’t receive restorative sleep, even though you may fall asleep quickly.
The list for the causes of chronic insomnia can go on and on. My advice is, whenever insomnia sets in, don’t let it continue for more than 2 days. Seek help immediately or your acute insomnia may unwittingly develop into the more serious chronic insomnia. But go with natural insomnia remedies rather than returning home with a bags of drugs. All sleep medications possess hidden side effects and they can only provide superficial insomnia symptom relief.
