Understanding Insomnia and Its Causes

Insomnia is caused due to several reasons. These reasons may be separated to situational, medical and psychiatric factors and sleeping problems. Insomnia can be classified according to the timings the symptoms lasts like short term, chronic or transient. Transient insomnia lasts for less than a week whereas short term insomnia generally lasts for nearly three weeks and the chronic insomnia continues for three weeks or sometimes more than that.

Some of the causes behind short term and transient insomnia are similar. Some of them are as follows:

• Changes in the normal shift of work
• Jet lag
• Unpleasant or excessive noise
• Uncomfortable temperature in the room
• Stress like preparing for the exam, losing someone who is very close to you, divorce, unemployment and separation
• Surgery
• Withdrawal from alcohol, sedative or drug

People climbing the mountains also suffer from insomnia. The uncontrolled physical symptoms like fever, breathing problem, pain, congestion in the nose and cough can also result in insomnia. If a person controls these symptoms and the causes behind it, he or she can get a relief from insomnia.

Causes Behind long term and chronic insomnia

Most of the causes behind long term and chronic insomnia are generally linked to a psychiatric and physiological medical condition. Some of the general psychological issues that leads to insomnia are:

1. Depression
2. Anxiety
3. Schizophrenia
4. Stress
5. Bipolar disorder

Insomnia is also regarded as a pointer of depression. There are some who suffer from insomnia when they are in the acute stages of mental illness. As discussed earlier, anxiety is linked with insomnia. Among the secondary psychological and medical causes behind insomnia, anxiety is the common one.

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