Understanding
Understanding insomnia
Insomnia is the persistent difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking too early. Accompanied by daytime fatigue or impairment. Acute insomnia is short-term and usually traceable to a stressor. Chronic insomnia (more than three months) is almost always layered on top of another condition: anxiety, depression, untreated ADHD, trauma, hormonal changes, or sleep apnea.
Sedative-hypnotic medications can paper over the symptom, but they rarely solve chronic insomnia and often create new problems (tolerance, rebound, daytime sedation). The more durable approach is to identify the underlying driver and treat that. Combined with cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), which is the gold-standard non-pharmacologic treatment.