Chronic Insomnia Causes

Insomnia is a health condition typically characterized by a person's inability to fall asleep or stay asleep. Millions of people across the world suffer from this sleep disorder. Basically, insomnia can be divided into two types - acute insomnia and chronic insomnia. As their names suggest, acute or short term insomnia prevails for a brief period (around two or three weeks), while chronic insomnia tends to prevail for a relatively longer duration (around a month or more). Some medical journals enlist yet another type of insomnia - transient insomnia, wherein the person tends to experience sleeplessness, but only for a few days.

Chronic Insomnia Overview

Chronic insomnia is basically a condition characterized by sleeplessness for extended periods of time. This is a much more complex condition with some of the major physical and psychological conditions as its underlying causes. Chronic insomnia is further divided into primary chronic insomnia (wherein the disturbance in sleep pattern has no specific condition to point at) and secondary chronic insomnia (which can be attributed to certain physical or psychological conditions) on the basis of the underlying causes. Other than inability to sleep, some of the most prominent symptoms of this condition include muscle fatigue, hallucinations, double vision, etc. Interestingly, those people who suffer from this condition tend to display an amazing increase in their levels of alertness.

Causes of Chronic Insomnia

That brings us back to the core issue of this article - causes of chronic insomnia. Basically, chronic insomnia causes can be broadly categorized into three groups - psychological conditions, medical conditions and medications. The details of each of these are listed below.

Psychological Conditions: A restless mind can make it difficult for a person to sleep peacefully, and this restless mind can be attributed to a range of psychological conditions including stress and depression. Other than these conditions, chronic insomnia can also be attributed to bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. If not subjected to treatment, these conditions tend to worsen, and soon enough the person begins associating bed with his struggle to get that much-needed sleep, instead of looking at it as a place to take rest.

Medical Conditions: As with psychological conditions, many medical conditions i.e. diseases and disorders can also result in chronic insomnia. These health conditions range from allergy to a much more severe conditions such as kidney disease and cancer. Other medical conditions which are known to trigger insomnia include asthma, Parkinson's disease, acid reflux, etc. Then there also exist some sleep disorders, such as sleep apnea and restless legs syndrome, that can cause insomnia. In fact, severe pain as a result of injury or some underlying health problem is also known to make it difficult for the person to sleep.

Medications: This may come as a surprise for many, but certain drugs and medication are also known to cause insomnia by working on our mind and body. The best example of this is antidepressants which tend to work on your brain and make you much more active. More importantly, even simple cold and flu medications have the tendency to interfere with the normal sleep patterns, and cause insomnia. Other medications which are known to cause insomnia include painkillers, high blood pressure medications, diuretics etc.

As far as chronic insomnia treatment is concerned, it predominantly revolves around the identification of underlying causes and treatment of the same by resorting to various measures of treatment for sleep deprivation including chronic insomnia medications. Chronic insomnia is more of a symptom that a disorder in itself. That being said, it becomes very important to opt for its diagnosis and treatment before the underlying condition worsens and becomes even more serious. In case of chronic insomnia triggered by medications, changing the prescribed medications can help in easing the problems associated with them.