Insomnia is a difficulty of falling asleep or maintaining sleep, as well as sleep disturbances, which is created after the awakening a sense of lack of night rest.
Insomnia – not a disease but a symptom that has many different reasons, including emotional problems, different diseases and the use of certain drugs. Difficulty in falling asleep is common with both young and elderly people. Usually it is associated with emotional state, such as anxiety, nervousness, depression or fear. Sometimes it is difficult for man to sleep simply because he was not tired.
With age, people usually begin to sleep less. Duration of sleep stages also varies: Stage IV becomes shorter and gradually disappear, awakening occur more frequently and at all stages. Despite the fact that these changes are normal, they are often forced elderly man to believe that he did not sleep enough. However, there is no evidence that healthy elder people need the same duration of sleep as young, or that they need medication for insomnia, eliminate these natural aging changes.
Early morning awakening is more common in older age. Some people fall asleep normally but wake up several hours later and cannot easily get back to sleep again. Sometimes anxious sleep, which does not give any rest, is interrupted by frequent awakenings. Early morning awakening at any age may be a sign of depression.
If the nature of sleep is disturbed, there is often a distortion of the sleep rhythm: a man falls asleep at the wrong time and could not sleep when he should. This happens because of jet lag (especially when traveling from east to west), work at night, and frequent changes in schedule or excessive drinking. Sometimes the distortion of the sleep rhythm is a side effect of some medicines. Failure of biological rhythms of the brain (caused by, for example, encephalitis, stroke or Alzheimer’s disease) also may interfere with the nature of sleep.