1Overview
Have you ever prayed for sleep? When you wake up in the middle of the night, it’s just 3 am; you roll to and from the edges of your bed, you want to fall back and get your complete sleep yet you can not. This is really worrisome, outside the feeling of loneliness when everywhere is calm and it appears you are the only one awake in the city of a thousand and one. Most times, you might keep your ears to the ground hoping you can hear out one of your “partners in wakefulness”. Well, you might not hear the voices you wanted, but you are definitely not the only one. A study has shown that about one in every three adults or about 30% of the population have a degree of sleep disturbance and deprivation, while just a few percentages of this meet the criteria for the diagnosis of insomnia, it is still a sizable segment of the population.
Insomnia is a chronic inability to get enough sleep either due to the inability to fall asleep or the inability to return to sleep after slight wakefulness. Usually, an average adult can wake up 7 to 15 times in the night, but these are barely significant or noticeable because we usually fall back to sleep almost immediately. A person with a sleeping disorder might find it difficult returning to sleep after one of these episodes and a disturbance of this all-important aspect of our life is quite troubling.
