The presenter Juan Diego Alvira confirmed this Tuesday on his YouTube channel that a health problem “has kept him awake for a long time.” Alvira’s condition is insomnia and he took on the task of explaining it to his followers during a live. The presenter assured that this happens to him more than three times a week and explained that this is the reason for his absence on the Caracol channel. Insomnia is one of the most frequent symptoms of mental disorders. On the one hand, because sleep disorders have a significant influence on our emotional and cognitive state, and at the same time, our emotional state and our thoughts affect the quality of our sleep.
“Many times we people try to solve it on our own by carrying out measures that only work in the short term, but that in the medium term make it worse and make this an increasingly difficult problem to solve, therefore, it is key to stress that the insomnia is not synonymous with using pills to induce or maintain sleep”, explain the experts from the López Ibor Psychiatric Clinic, on the occasion of World Sleep Day.
They also allude to other causes linked to recent events, such as the pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine, as external factors that aggravate sleep disturbances.
A latest study from the British Medical Journal indicates that people who have recovered from COVID-19 are 60% more likely to suffer from mental health problems than people who have not. These include sleep and cognition disturbances, as well as other disorders such as anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation, as well as opioid, drug, and alcohol use disorder.
According to the same source, it is important to emphasize sleep disorders in children and young people and to know how to act so that the problem does not drag on over time, since according to a study by the Pennsylvania State University School of Medicine (Penn State), in the United States, children with sleep disorders often continue to suffer as adults.
These problems affect up to 25% of children, 35% of adolescents, and 45% of young adults.
Children and adolescents are a sector of the population whose mental health is being seriously affected due to everything that has been going on in recent years.
Anxiety, stress, fear, frustration, anger, sadness, eating behavior disorders and, of course, sleep disorders are increasingly common in consultation.
Recommendations for insomnia and its causes
The dream, they point out from the López Ibor Clinic, is a very complex process, it is not only about “disconnecting”, so we must give it the importance it really has, therefore, they explain and recommend:
1. Do not go to the quick answer. We often try to deal with insomnia as if it were isolated from our emotional states and the thoughts associated with it.
We take pills to induce or maintain sleep without identifying other factors that are generating insomnia, or even in some cases, we consume substances of abuse (such as alcohol or cannabis) as a short-term solution.
2. Behind the insomnia there may be other problems. Mental syndromes occur very frequently with insomnia, precisely because of the emotional disturbances that accompany it.
So if we do not act on these, the substances that we consume to induce sleep usually, on the one hand, alter normal and restorative sleep (what we call sleep architecture) and, on the other hand, stop working after a period of time.
3. Danger tolerance. Sometimes we tend to increase the dose of what we take and carry out risk patterns of consuming legal (such as alcohol), illegal (such as cannabis) or medical substances (such as lorazepam, zolpidem, alprazolam, etc.)
4. The mistake of being afraid of not sleeping: Insomnia can cause the night to begin to become a stimulus that generates fear and our body is not made to sleep in fear.
In addition, sleep is not voluntary, wishing for it is not enough. The more we fear insomnia, the more likely we are to suffer from it.
5. Pre-sleep emotions are key: To sleep, our brain has to understand that it is in a state of rest, in which it does not need to act in a certain way.
For this reason, emotions, which activate our behavior, do not allow us to fall asleep, or if we do, they can generate a very superficial and little restful sleep.
6. Pre-sleep thoughts are also key: The thoughts we have generate emotions, but in turn, emotional states facilitate the presence of certain thoughts.
This process happens very quickly and often we are not aware that it is happening if we do not observe it carefully.