Insomnia and all its faces

How did you sleep last night? Did you fall asleep? What did you dream about?
I don’t know what you think, but we believe that the general question “How are you?”, Which we all ask each other to express our care and affection or fill moments of unpleasant silence, should be replaced with some of these questions.

We live in times when sleep becomes an underestimated aspect of life. We don’t have time, don’t achieve, and constantly need a few hours to get everything we can imagine. There is a constant sense of urgency, a feeling that we are missing something and have forgotten to do something as if there is no tomorrow! They say time is money, so we never have enough money, and we constantly think about how we could have done better and more.
Where does this lead? We will soon have a guilty conscience that we even perform basic physiological needs! Food, sleep, reproduction, as factors that take up our precious time? No way!

In fact, only a few steps separate us from this phase of the “development” of the human species because the modern world order and consumer society impose it on us very successfully. It is up to us to get out of it as soon as possible.

One of the tributes we pay to this urban and hectic lifestyle is sleep. To function normally during the day, our body needs between 7 and 8 hours of sleep every night.

How many people spend that time at least lying down? Not to mention sleep.

According to the latest research, almost half of the total world’s population suffers from insomnia or some kind of sleep disorder. To most people, insomnia is known as the inability to fall asleep when they go to sleep. However, as a disorder it has many variations:

• Inability to fall asleep until late at night, even though you have all the necessary prerequisites for it and feel tired.
• Restless sleep, spontaneous waking during the night at specific, regular, or irregular time intervals.
• Inability to fall asleep again once you wake up.
• Complete absence of night sleep.
• A combination of all of the above.

The first indicator of sleep deprivation is a bad mood. If you wake up grumpy, nervous, without energy, and tired, it means that your sleep did not have the effect it should have. Why is this happening to you?

Deep sleep is a mechanism for the renewal of the mind, during which many physiological processes take place. They play an essential role in the regeneration of the body – the blood supply to the organs is increased so that they are restored, and in optimal function during the day, body temperature and metabolic activity are reduced to save energy. The secretion of growth hormone is at maximum because it allows regeneration and recovery of tissues. Under the influence of the hormone melatonin, the complete immune system of the organism is renewed and prepared for defense against bacteria and viruses.

While other organs rest and regenerate, the brain works hard to process the data we receive during the day, stores the essential ones, eliminates the irrelevant, strengthens the neural network around the information that should be kept clean and those that burden us unnecessarily.

What a perfect machine that human organism is, isn’t it?

The trouble of this perfect machine is in a highly hostile environment – life in urban areas, mobile telephony, radio waves, satellite communications, Wi-Fi – are all factors that affect our natural biorhythm, aligned with the time of sunrise and sunset. Thus it affects the rhythm of awakeness and sleep (circadian rhythm) and the quality of sleep itself.

If you do not recognize and deal with the factors that disrupt the quality and rhythm of your sleep, in time, dark circles around the eyes and puffy eyelids will be the least of your problems. In addition to the problems with cognitive processes that we have already mentioned, you are in danger of high blood pressure, and prolonged insomnia can be so tiring that it can cause a heart attack. Insomnia is usually accompanied by being overweight, and there is a high chance of getting diabetes, depression, anxiety, and panic attacks.

For this text not to turn into raising a general revolt against the technological progress of humanity, because that is by no means our intention, we need to clarify something. We have all once experienced that we cannot sleep or sleep poorly; it’s normal.
However, when it happens to you every week, several times a week, or every night and affects your social life, causes physical disturbances, interferes with your work, and disturbs your emotional status – it’s time to do something.

So, we ask you again – how did you sleep last night?

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