Category — Sleep Problems

The New York Times has an interesting article exploring whether insomnia can kill you. The short answer is no it cannot kill you. There is an extremely rare form of insomnia that can potentially be fatal, but it only affects 100 people in the world: so, chances are you are okay.

We’ve talked a lot about the daily problems insomnia causes its victims. New information however suggests that insomniacs don’t live as long as non-insomniac people. Wow, if there were ever a reason to get a Rozerem prescription and start getting your proper rest…there it is! Take a look at the death statistics of those who suffer from chronic insomnia. This is really scary stuff.

Well, I defined what is insomnia elsewhere on this site. But, since I’m going through and doing sleep vocabulary from A to Z… I better include it again, and I’ll expand a bit by also discussing here internal arousal insomnia.

Okay, the quick definition for insomnia is that it’s the inability to get as much sleep as needed for normal, waking hour functioning. The literal meaning of the word insomnia is no sleep. However, insomniacs almost always get at least a little bit of sleep in a 24 hour time frame.

Internal arousal insomnia is a particular flavor of insomnia. This is interesting. It’s something that happens because of excessive mental activity (the brain being overstimulated from intellectual activity or fun.) It can also happen when you try to hard to sleep. I think we’ve all been there.

Hypnagogic images are very crazy types of images that occur at sleep’s beginning: most intense when the sleep session begins with an REM stage (as often is the case with narcolepsy).

Hypersomnia is prolonged or excessive sleep.

Half-life is a term frequently associated with drugs like Rozerem, Ambien, Lunestra, etc. It means that amount of time it takes for half of the drug to be eliminated from the patient’s body.