Insomnia

-

Sleeping is a vital activity to keep our mental and physical being healthy. Not getting adequate sleep can lead to many chronic diseases, one of them characterized as insomnia.

Although “insomnia” is a commonly used word, it’s clinically diagnosed using polysomnography, which is a series of tests to understand different parameters of sleep. It is a gold standard for diagnosing sleep-related disorders. Insomnia is identified with hyperarousal symptoms i.e., irritability, risky or destructive behavior, elevated flight-or-fight response, and difficulty concentrating and sleeping. They are often divided into day and night-time symptoms.

Studies have shown that personality traits like being self-critical, and suppressing emotions – basically unhealthy emotion regulation – along with neurobiological and genetic dysfunction are considered predisposing factors of insomnia. Mostly, stressful life events along with predisposing factors can lead to insomnia. Majorly, most of us get acute insomnia which might or might not turn into a chronic disorder. 


Once a condition is identified factors that maintain the state are called perpetuating factors. For insomnia, one of them is behavioral adaptation like napping during the day or having alcohol to sleep – strategies to compensate for sleep loss. These can help you temporarily but they do not help the condition instead maintain sleep deprivation. 


Though insomnia is also seen as a secondary condition, it shouldn't be taken lightly. It affects not just your sleep but all the work and decisions you take the day after, which goes on in circles. Hence, consultation with a doctor should be made when suffering from insomnia.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mystery of memory

-
Image
Do you ever wonder why you remember certain things very clearly, some very faintly, and some things not at all? Some childhood or past experiences just stick with us whereas others just don’t bother to stay in our brains for long.  Illustrated by Drishya Unnithan In simple terms, anything to be stored in our brain as memory has to pass via “memory compartments” for the brain to judge if it is even important to keep for a long time or not. This judgment is mostly based on how important or effective the thing is or how it affected us, though many other reasons remain unknown. Memory is broadly classified as short-term and long-term. However, many more subtypes are known depending on the experience and category the memory belongs to. For example, things that you remember about yourself are referred to as “autobiographical memory, ” and “working memory”  comes into action when you are listening to a thriller story while trying to figure out who the killer is.  Illustrated by ...
Read more

Science vs Pseudoscience

-
Image
Remember those days, when the first question in the exam was,  “What is Science?” And we would just think and think, and write the definition we learned by rote. Most of us probably don’t even remember that definition now, but if someone asked you today what is science? Can you define it?  The term that is so commonly used but yet a bit tricky to explain, right? In simple terms, anything that you observe and can be proved by experiments becomes science. But the problem with this definition is the question: “so what you can’t observe or prove is not science then?” Because science does not have these clear defined limits, it creates a loophole, which gives rise to concepts like pseudoscience.  Illustrated by Drishya Unnithan Pseudoscience comprises beliefs, notions, practices that occur in the world in the name of science without actually being fact or evidence based. For example, a very popular trend that is coming up where anyone claims to have produced a “Covid-19 treati...
Read more