Sleep easy with Ambien

What is insomnia?

At some point, more or less everyone has some difficulty in sleeping. It can start as a gradual lengthening of the time you spend lying down before sleep comes. If you are on your own, you toss and turn. If you share a bed, you lie still to avoid disturbing your partner, who never seems to have any difficulty in going straight to sleep. Either way, this is boring and annoying. But the problem becomes more noticeable if you then wake again after only a few hours. It is still dark but, try as you might, sleep does not return. Even if you sleep through to daylight, it can still be way too early to get up. What would you do if you did?

The more this happens, the less refreshing you find your actual time asleep. The next day, you walk around feeling as if you had no sleep at all. Your mood changes to one of increasing impatience and restlessness. You grow irritable and a little anxious. Your concentration suffers, your eyes feel heavy and lose focus, you yawn all the time and, occasionally, you cannot recall what you were doing for the last few minutes. This kind of memory loss can be a real danger sign.

Slowly you find yourself disconnected from the world. It is a gradual alienation. These are the first signs of clinical depression. Loss of sleep also affects your immune system and you will probably find yourself catching more coughs and colds. As you become more seriously deprived of sleep, you will get headaches and may find yourself suffering dizziness or fainting spells, growing confused or hallucinating. Your speech grows slurred and incomprehensible, and your body may be affected by tremors.

Who is affected by insomnia?

Children seem increasing affected by Attention-Deficit, Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). One of the ways in which this affects the young is difficulty in sleeping. Every parent has seen the mood of their children change if they do not get enough sleep. They become irritable and their behaviour becomes less well-controlled. In physical terms, the immediate consequences are a change in the levels of three types of hormones. These hormones are usually produced during deep sleep:

• to ensure that your children proper growth — without them muscle mass is not built for strength and co-ordination, tissue is not added and damaged cells are not repaired;
• to boost the immune system — with a "healthy" immune system, children either do not get sick or recover quickly from the usual childhood illnesses. If the immune system is underperforming, they may be ill more often; and
• to regulate how the body uses energy and controls appetite. Recent clinical studies show that children who sleep less are more likely to be overweight, risk developing diabetes, and tend to eat foods high in calories and carbohydrates to replace energy burned through excessive wakefulness.

As ADHD children enter the teenage years, their social problems are likely to become more pronounced and affect teachers and others both in school and the community at large. Research is well underway to find whether Ambien in association with the standard ADHD drugs, can help to manage overactivity problems more effectively.

As teenagers become young adults and leave school, the world of work forces some degree of social conformity, but new problems may emerge if they do shift work or travel a lot, particularly by air with the inevitable jet-lag. Changes to shift patterns or jet-lag force an internal desynchronization of biological rhythms. This means that your internal body clocks and circadian rhythms have to adapt to changing circumstances. This breaks your natural sleep patterns. Your body may be telling you it is time to sleep, but doing so may not be possible. Sadly, there are no drugs on the market that can reset your internal clocks.

A further difficulty comes from lifestyle changes that are not so obviously connected with insomnia. Many of the manufactured foods on the market contain chemicals to extend the shelf-life or maintain color and taste. Some of these chemicals can have a physical effect. Similarly, many medications have less well advertised side effects that it more difficult to sleep. Without thinking you may also drink too much caffeine both as coffee and in soft drinks. Or it may be those over-the-counter cold/decongestant tablets. Unless you go and talk to a physician about your diet and lifestyle, identifying the precise cause of your insomnia may not be at all easy.

One of the insomnia myths is that "older" people are more likely to have difficulty sleeping. "Old" for this purpose is the arbitrarily selected age of fifty-five years. In reality, this simply confuses cause with effect. As people grow older, they are more likely to develop minor aches and pains. More illnesses and diseases affect them. It is these other conditions that disrupt their sleep. If they get treatment to relieve the other problems, sleep is likely to return to its more usual pattern.