Early identification and treatment of insomnia in a depressed patient is important. Proper treatment not only helps the insomnia, but resolving sleep problems also seems to help patients do a better job of sticking with their treatment plans. Alleviating insomnia also improves overall functioning and performance for depressed patients.

Tell your doctor if your’re depressed and having trouble sleeping. You should avoid certain popular antidepressants, including some of the selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SNRIs). They stimulate serotonin receptors in the brain and change sleep patterns, producing insomnia. However, antidepressents like mirtazapine and nefazodone that block the stimulation of serotonin receptors actually help people with depression get to sleep more quickly, and sleep better and longer.

We’re not suggesting that you ignore the problem and not see your doctor unless you think you have a sleep disorder. Poor-quality sleep is a medical concern no matter what its cause or duration. Even if your problem is temporary (and especially if it’s recurrent), your doctor can offer several suggestions to help you sleep better, and can prescribe a nonaddicting sleep medication for those nights when sleep won’t come. But temporary sleep disturbances may not require full scale diagnostic work-up that a more serious disorder like sleep apnea needs.

Poor sleep comes in a variety of forms. Perhaps your head hits the pillow and you fall asleep within seconds, but awaken in the middle of the night and find yourself pacing the floor. Or maybe you lie awake staring at the ceiling for hours, wondering if sleep will ever come. It could be you don’t have trouble falling asleep, but wake up earlier than you’d like. Or maybe you seem to sleep okay but awaken in the morning unrefreshed. No matter how the problem presents itself. These disruptions result in less-than-optimal sleep, which means your brain isn’t getting the sleep it needs to repair your body and recharge itself.

Check out the following list of common factors that can cause occasional sleeplessness. But remember, even not-so-serious causes of sleeplessness can add up to a big problem if you allow your sleep problems to go unchecked.

- Battling nasal congestion

- Consuming caffeine, especially close to bedtime.

- Dealing with disruptive neighbors

- Exercising too vigorously close to bedtime

- Experiencing pain from arthritis, headaches, illness, or any other cause

- Lying on an uncomfortable mattress, pillow, or adjustable bed.

- Overindulging in rich or spicy foods, especially close to bedtime.

- Sharing your bed with kids and/or pets.

- Sleeping in a cluttered bedroom

- Sleeping in an uncomfortable environment that’s too hot or cold.

- Smoking and/or drinking alcohol close to bedtime

- Stressing about work or school or getting overly excited about upcoming events like a vacation or competition

- Taking stimulating herbal supplements.

Pilot fatigue and the resulting diminished judgment were given part of the blame for the 1999 American Airlines crash in Little Rock, Arkansas. Sleep deprivation was also involved in the accident with the Staten Island Ferry that crashed into the dock at full speed in October in 2003. The assistant captain piloting the ferry made no attempt to slow the boat down because he was sound asleep at the controls. Many other disasters were caused by key personnel who made bad decisions because they were operating on too little sleep.

Many industries are finally waking up to the fact that allowing their employees to work with too little sleep is dangerous. However, just as many employees ignore the fact that humans require adequate sleep to function well. So for every intern program that now allows its young doctors to sleep six hours every night, you still have a program that pushes it’s doctors to perform on one or two hours sleep (or no sleep), and that lack of sleep can lead to serious medical mistakes. Even worse, these programs may require house staff to work back-to-back shifts with no break in between. Increasing pressure has come to bear on work schedules during medical training in the wake of several high-profile wrongful death cases.

If you consistently have trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or awakening unrefreshed and feeling groggy, then you likely have a sleep disorder. Only your doctor can determine what’s actually going on with your sleep, but you can help him in the diagnostic process by keeping a sleep diary.

You don’t have to keep suffering through one sleepless night after another, or stumble through your days only half awake. An Adjustable bed that is fit for you may be the solution.

Public awareness of drunk driving is high, but sleepy driving is barely on the radar. Sleepy drivers cause more than 100,000 traffic accidents a year, accidents that could all be prevented if everyone made sure they had enough sleep before operating a motor vehicle. According to the National Sleep Foundation, drowsy-driving accidents cause 1,550 unnecessary deaths, 71,000 injuries, and $12.5 billion in property losses and lost productivity every year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports 1 million accidents are caused for inattentiveness behind the wheel are sleep deprivation and fatigue. Sleepy drivers aren’t just putting themselves at risk by getting behind the wheel; they’re putting their passengers as well as other drivers and their passengers at risk. They are also a threat to pedestrians.

People who drive for a living have an even higher risk of being in an accident while driving. Approximately 47 percent of all truck drivers report that they’ve fallen asleep at the wheel at least once during their driving careers. Getting proper amounts of sleep is the only solution to this problem. Many people find that adjustable beds with the proper mattress improve their sleep.

All to often, when you’re pressed for time, sleep is the first thing you cut back on, right? You reason that you can get by with a little less, and then a little less, and before long, you may fid yourself snapping at your spouse or your children, making a bad desision at work, or forgetting an important meeting, or worse yet, falling asleep at the wheel of your car and waking up (if you wake up) wrapped around a telephone pole.

Why do people suffer so many negative consequences when they cut back on their sleep? Because you can’t change your need for sleep any more than you sprout wing and fly. The human brain and body require a daily period of rest in order to:

- Achieve a high energy level
- Have sharp mental function, the ability to concentrate, and good decision making skills
- Improve memory
- Maintain a positive mental outlook that helps you manage stress
- Strengthen your immune system to help keep you well.

When you’re properly rested, you stay physically and psychologically healthier, your brain and body recharge, remain healthy, and function at an optimal level. That’s how the human animal evolved.

People who get too little sleep tend to have more health problems than people who get an adequate amount of sleep. For example, the Nurses Health Study followed more than 71,000 women for ten years to observe a number of health indicators. One unexpected results (at least to the researchers) of the study was concrete evidence that long-term sleep deprivation increases the risk of heat disease. Women who averaged five hours of sleep per night had a 39 percent higher risk of heart disease than women who slept seven to eight hours each night.

But you may be surprised to discover that people who sleep nine hours or more also have more health problems. Researchers aren’t yet sure if people with health problems sleep more as a consequence of their poor health, or if people who sleep more than eight hours a night have a higher risk of chronic health problems. A good nights rest always starts with the proper bed. Adjustable beds have been shown to provide a higher sleep quality than ordinary beds.

Many people live at a breakneck pace. If your life is as busy and over-scheduled as most people, you probably cut back on the number of hours your sleep each night when pressed for time. This process of shortchanging sleep time pressure increases for social, work, and school demands usually begins in middle school and becomes rampant by the time an individual graduates high school. You may kid yourself that you can get by with a little less sleep, but suddenly on the nights when you want and need to get a full night’s sleep in your adjustable bed, you can’t. The more you think about not being able to fall asleep, the more frustrated you get, and the more frustrated you get, the less likely it is that you’ll ever fall asleep. And the more nights you go without a decent night’s sleep, the less fun you have and the less fun you are to be around, not to mention the charming bags you’ll eventually be carrying around under your eye’s.

If this scenario sounds familiar, first determine if your sleep problems are temporary or ongoing. This information can help you figure out whether or not you need help from a sleep specialist to address your problem.

Most sleep problems are temporary. As soon as you figure out what’s causing it, you can address the problem and return to sleeping well once more. If you need help to fall asleep easily you may want to consider a new adjustable bed.

When you can’t get to sleep or stay asleep, or you sleep a full night but wake up exhausted and not refreshed, then you may have a more serious problem. Chronic loss of sleep can be dangerous to your health. Get it checked out as soon as possible. After you have a definitive diagnosis keep working on solutions for a better sleep.

Don’t obsess about an occasional bout of sleeplessness. Everybody has a few restless nights from time to time – the eight-and-a-half month pregnant woman who feels like a beached whale, the college kid stressing out over important exam, and the businessman waiting to hear if he’s landed that big deal. But when sleeplessness becomes the rule rather than the exception, take time to evaluate your sleeping habits to see if you have a real problem or have just developed some bad bedtime habits.

On the other hand, if you stare the ceiling night after night and can barely drag yourself through your days, what are you waiting for? A big rock to fall out of the sky and land on your bed with a note attached that says “You may have a sleep disorder”?

In this section, I can help you evaluate your sleep quality to determine whether you need outside help or whether you can address the problem on your own. Sometimes all you need is a bit of patience, or to give up the midnight bowls of chili with onions. Other times, you may really need to see your doctor to have you sleep patters evaluated.

In this post, I will talk about the possible causes of chronic sleeplessness and explain the concept of sleep debt. Just to make sure you’re not alone, I will thrown in a few interesting statistics on sleep. I will also discuss the importance of early dignosis and appropriate treatment if you do have a sleep disorder. Whether your problems with sleep are temporary or something more serious, we give you the info you need to determine your next step. So stop yawning and read on before you doze off again.

Tobacco is a plant that contains the highly addictive and poisonous substance, nicotine. Smoking, as we all now know, is a serious health hazard. Anyone suffering from insomnia should have a particular incentive for giving up smoking because nicotine is a stimulant that raises the blood pressure and triggers the release of adrenalin into the blood stream. This will make sleep lighter and more liable to disruption. Also the coughing and other nose and throat problems associated with smoking may contribute to snoring and will certainly affect breathing.

Unfortunately, the smoker who wakes up in the night may find a cigarette relaxing. But this feeling of relaxation is only to due to temporary relief of satisfying a craving and will soon pass. Then the stimulating effect of the nicotine will simply keep the smoker awake. At the very least, smokers should ban smoking from the bedroom.

Caffeine is a stimulant found in both coffee and tea. it is also present in cola, cocoa and in many over-the-counter cold, flu and pain-relief medications, as well as some prescribed treatments. One of the dangers of caffeine is that is is addictive and the body quickly becomes tolerant of it, so that larger and larger doses are required to feel any effect. Caffeine remains in the body for several hours and has an accumulative effect so that, by night time, there may be a build up of caffeine in the body that keeps us awake at night. Try to limit your tea and coffee intake by drinking herbal infusions such as camomile and fruit teas instead. If you can’t do without the taste of coffee, try the decaffeinated varieties.

Alcohol is widely thought of as a drug that will send us off to sleep – and in small doses this may be true since a glass of wine with dinner or a whisky after work may help us relax and unwind. Alcohol is, however addictive and long lasting stimulant. Even if we fall asleep quickly on going to bed, we are likely to wake up during the night in a hot and sweaty state if alcohol is drunk in large quantities. Excessive alcohol intake also reduces the quality of sleep, even if it does not actually wake us up, since sleep becomes less deep and the time spent in REM sleep is reduced.