Recently I met a 33-year old friend of mine at a café in town. He is a father of two children. He works as a bank manager and he is a hard working man. He told me all was fine with him at work but complained of chronic headaches, general weakness and progressive loss of appetite. 

I advised him to visit me in one of my weekend clinics for assessment and make an actual physical evaluation of him.

In our meeting, we had enough time to chat, so I took him to the corners of our fresh looking hospital and tried to make him get acclimatized to the hospital environment.

He narrated to me that his mother had been repeatedly hospitalized in one of the hospitals located in the eastern part of the country for hypertension but also suffers regular episodes of limb dysfunction and weakness.

I found that he had long been mindful about the health condition of his mother whose hypertension has not been controlled for a long-time.

Though he was not direct enough to reveal how stressed he feels about his mother’s condition, he asked me whether I could get him some tablets that could help him sleep.

He revealed how he struggles to get sleep even if he is very tired and even when he catches some sleep; he usually wakes up in the middle of the night and lies awake on his bed for hours. He told me his condition is very uncomfortable because it makes him feel tired in the morning.

This guy suffers from chronic insomnia secondary to stress. This problem usually has an effect on the mood, energy, health, and the ability to work properly during day time. Such a condition can expose you to other serious health problems. You always need simple changes in your lifestyle in order to overcome the insomnia problem.

Anyway, I asked my friend to bring his mother from the village and treated the complicated hypertension. The improvement of his mother’s condition has made him dress a pleasant face.

People can lose sleep due to different reasons. Insomnia is the inability to have enough sleeping time you need to feel well-rested and refreshed.

This is because different people based on their lifestyles need different amounts of sleep time. This means insomnia is highly dependent on the quality of sleep exposed and the resting potential of your body after sleeping. It has no connection with the number of hours you sleep or how quickly you get to sleep. Even if you spend 9 hours a night in bed, if you feel drowsy and fatigued during the day time, this is an indicator of insomnia.

Although insomnia is the most common sleep complaint, it is not a single sleep disorder. It’s more accurate to think of insomnia as a symptom of another problem, which differs from person to person. It could be something as simple as drinking too much caffeine during the day or a more complex issue like an underlying medical condition or feeling overloaded with responsibilities.

The most important aspect to understand about insomnia is that most of the conditions can be reversed if the primary cause is cured rather than thinking about medications and prescriptions for sleeping pills.

Getting quality sleep and feeling refreshed upon awakening is arguably more important than any other determinant of health.

All of the major hormones that your body manufactures for healing and repair such as growth hormone, erythropoietin, and testosterone are produced and released into your bloodstream when the body is well-rested.

Put another way, when you regularly crave more sleep, your body almost certainly is not creating enough healing hormones to keep you optimally healthy, which guarantees that at some point, you will begin to break down and have trouble recovering from small or large trauma that your tissues experience during everyday activities.

Good sleep hygiene, including unplugging from all sources of stimulation is critically important to your performance and longevity. If you’re experiencing any health challenges or just feeling sluggish or a lack of mental clarity, I encourage you to seek an annual leave and try to rest your head.