How to overcome insomnia?

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

According to statistics, about 20% of adults complain of sleep disorders. However, doctors have suspicions that many more people experience problems with falling asleep regularly or from time to time. Moreover, the fairer sex is mainly tormented. How to cope with insomnia without resorting to medications?

American scientists argue that the best method of dealing with insomnia is to get out of bed as soon as you feel that you cannot fall asleep for some reason. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine conducted a clinical experiment in which 79 people took part, whose average age was 72 years. None of them received sleeping pills.

According to an official public survey of the Ministry of Health and Social Development of Russia, 47.4% of Russians sleep 7-9 hours a day, 20% - 6 hours or less, 7.9% sleep on weekends. About 6, 5% of the respondents sleep more than 9 hours a day, 7, 7% answered that “no matter how much I sleep, everything is not enough for me”, “how it will turn out” 8, 3% described their sleep, and 2, 2% admitted that they have insomnia.

With each subject, psychologists conducted daily sessions of special therapy, wishing to "tune" the patients to a special sleep regime, in which they were forbidden to force themselves to fall asleep. In case of problems with falling asleep, the subjects were recommended to get out of bed and be distracted for 15-20 minutes.

After a month of therapy, almost 60% of patients reported significant improvements in sleep quality, with some of them completely recovering from insomnia. Another six months of follow-up observations did not reveal any deterioration in the achieved treatment result.

The main mistake people who suffer from sleep disorders make is that most of them just lie in bed, suffering from anxiety about their illness. “If you do not want to sleep, do not force yourself to do it by force; if you wake up in the middle of the night and can't sleep, don't just lie in bed,”says psychologist Thomas Neilan of the University of California, San Francisco.