How to Prevent Sleepless Nights

Insomnia is recognized as a 24-hour mental and physical disorder by psychologists. It may be problem of sleep onset, its maintenance, or early waking and imperils person's day-time well-being, physical activities, and mental alertness. Although, its influences are physical and mental, its sources are most often psychological.

Common sources of insomnia are work-stress, change of life-style, night-shift duties, and even inadequate physical activities. It not only imperils general well-being of the person, it onsets other chronic disorders like anxiety and depression. Cancer, arthritis and diabetes may be its other indirect consequences. The most common of such anxiety is the anxiety of not getting sleep, which makes it a chronic disorder. This makes early treatment of insomnia imperative for general well-being. Insomnia is a more common problem in women than men, and older adults than younger ones. These occurrences signify its relationship to inadequate physical activities.


Researchers have found some drugs which correct the syndrome and induce sleep. These are of two types - one, having short term effects to induce sleep and their effect gets vanished by the morning. Although, these are risk-free their usage must be limited to only when needed to cut short a sleepless night. These calm down the mind and some may provide relief to other aching parts of the body. With some usage, the body clock of the person starts working correctly and the problem of sleeplessness may be over.


Other category of drugs developed have hypnotic effect and their influence continues for long duration, thus imperiling normal life of the person. These are meant to treat influences of traumas or other mis-happenings to relive the person mentally from his/her physical environment. No doubt, these drugs are not risk-free. 


In sleep disorders categorized as 'parasomnias', the patient suffers from night terrors, sleep-walking and/or even violent behaviors at night and these need to be thoroughly diagnosed polysomnography and video-recordings. The main issue to be settled is whether the disorder appears during REM (rapid eye movements) or non-REM sleep and this discovery leads to different treatments of the patient. Such issues must be left to specialists of the disorder.


A third type of sleep disorder is circadian rhythm disorder in which the patient loses touch with the natural cycles of time such as those of day-night and annual climatic changes. These are caused by shift-working and jet-lags. Such syndromes are often corrected by the body itself in course of time and in touch with natural cycles. No drug need be taken for this.


Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is purely a psychological treatment of mental disorders including sleeplessness in which the patients behavior is altered through imparting adequate knowledge to him/her, or even diverting his/her attention from the topic of anxiety to pleasures of life. 


Most important aspect to be understood in the treatment of sleep disorders is that sleep is function of the wholeness of the body, and it must be treated through treating the wholeness. Some body fibers are spread throughout the body terminating at soles and palms of the person. Treating the body through soles and palms is the most natural and the best way of treating sleep disorders. Walking is an exercise that treats the body through soles and proves effective in curing sleeplessness. Oil massages on the whole body and particularly on palms and soles soothes the whole body and relieves it to be congenial to a good sleep. 



For the aged, the most important advice is that for reduction in their physical activities their need for sleep duration is also diminished. Many senior persons suffer with the anxiety of not getting proper sleep while they get sleep good enough their bodies need and they need not to worry about it. Their fake anxiety causes more sleeplessness and other problems of life.   

Schedule Yourself for Happiness

Final goal of life is happiness but we forget to seek it directly and go in a round-about way in search of it. We often think that money shall buy conveniences and comforts for us and these will make us happy. So, we get involved in earning money too much that we find no time for enjoying direct pleasures of life available free for us. This happens because we miss to include happiness in our schedules. 

Another distraction from happiness comes from televisions in our homes which most of us think as enjoyable companions. When you are watching, you are losing your freedom of interacting but forced to follow the given track blindly. It may look thrilling on a few occasions but for most of the time it costs you pleasures of socializing. Provision of a huge number of channels and binding of watching commercials adds fuel to fire making you hopping in search of some moments of thrills but failing. Comparatively, listening to a radio program is less distracting as this provides you freedom of interacting with your companions while keeping on hearing the program. In fact, you keep on switching between listening and hearing the program as need be. 


Making a schedule of things to be done in the current week and then day, and then sticking to it as far as possible, is a good exercise. But remember that our bindings take away our pleasures, so the schedule should not be taken as a binding but as a discipline. When a person begins to exercise scheduling, it may appear useless for a few weeks or days. So don't get discouraged by such failures and continue this exercise to discipline your life and adding a great value to your lifestyle. 


Family and friends are the primary sources of happiness for everybody and these find no place in schedules of most of us. So, schedule your day in a way that you have time to interact closely with your family and friends on a daily basis. Children recreate every person coming in contact with them. Have time to mix with them and relearn their innocence to add a precious value to your life. 


Here are some important tips -

1. Health above all : There can be no pleasure greater than a good health and this requires time on a daily basis. Knowing your body well and keep on asking your body organs one by one 'how they are feeling' at a preset free time for it is as necessary for good health as taking rest and having a sound sleep on a regular basis. The first activity requires that you have some carefree moments for your body, and the latter requires that your body and mind ask for a rest after some hectic activities - physical and/or mental. Remember, your body has in-built self-curing mechanism against ailments and this works only when you provide opportunity through leisure in your schedule.   
2. Time for Relationships : Interactions with family members, friends and other social contacts is as important as your business or professional activities for the wholeness of life. Remember, it is the quality of a relationship that matters rather than the quantity of it. If you are a busy person, keep your list of relationships trimmed but whatever contacts you have feel the warmth of the contact. I find people having thousands of online friends on social sites like the Facebook and never bothering to interact with them in a personalized way. This is an exercise in redundancy that bothers you more than providing any value to your life. Trim such a list of yours by deleting those contacts remaining out of contact for a month or so without a valid reason.  
3. Saving time through delegation : Most of the persons feel being too much busy with their professional/business activities and finding no time for seeking pleasures. This happens because they believe in doing everything by themselves and thus mess-up with their happiness of life. Instead, the busy professionals/business-persons must perform only guiding and regulatory functions leaving the executive functions to their subordinates. But do not forget to have a mix of physical and mental works for yourself to keep fit and alert. 
4. Deleting the Redundant : Time is the most precious commodity but its value is not understood for our mis-concept of its free availability. This leads us to getting involved in many activities providing no value to our lives. Sitting before a television set for long durations is surely such an exercise. Looking for such redundancies and deleting them from life proves highly paying as far as saving time for keeping fit and socializing is concerned. One item, found to be the most redundant in lives of most of us, is waiting for something to happen or somebody to arrive. This happens just because either we or our companions are not disciplined. To cut this redundancy, firstly add discipline to your life and secondly, relax instead of impatiently waiting to provide rest to your body and mind.  
5. Implementing flexibly :  Whatever may be the hard work in meticulously planning life, contingencies are also unavoidable facts of life which keep on disturbing the preset schedules. Accept these disturbances also as part and parcel of life and to take due care of contingencies, keep flexibility in planning and also implementation. Only thing is that you have to be judicious about whether a contingency is worth disturbing the schedule.  

With such things in mind, you shall have less of stresses of work and relationships, greater productivity at home and at work, improved family and social relationships, and increased confidence in your abilities. In gist, it must be kept in mind that work is not the whole of life, relationships also matter a lot in adding happy moments to life.