It’s three o’clock in the morning, and you can’t sleep. You stare at the clock, aware that the alarm will go off in a few hours, but you can’t sleep. You know you have a busy day ahead and need to be rested, but you can’t sleep. No matter how hard you try, you can’t sleep. That means you have insomnia, a sleeping disorder.

According to the National Institutes of Health, insomnia affects more than 70 million Americans. Direct costs of insomnia, which include dollars spent on insomnia treatment, healthcare services, hospital and nursing home care, are estimated at nearly $14 billion annually. Indirect costs such as work loss, property damage from accidents and transportation to and from healthcare providers, are estimated to be $28 billion.

What is this condition that affects so many of us and costs so much? The word “insomnia” comes from the Latin in (”no”) and somnus (”sleep”), so it literally means “no sleep” or the inability to sleep, where you can’t sleep.

Insomnia is an experience of inadequate or poor quality sleep as characterized by one or more of the following sleep complaints:

1. Difficulty initiating sleep.

2. Difficulty maintaining sleep.

3. Waking too early in the morning.

In truth, the most common cause of insomnia where you can’t sleep is stress. All the beds, pillows and other toys out there can’t help you sleep if they can’t relieve your stress. Sure, you could put yourself to sleep with drugs or alcohol, but who wants to take pills or drink every night just to fall asleep. After all, you only get one body.

Various psychological and behavioral sleep therapies which you can try:

? Go to bed only when you’re sleepy.

? If you can’t sleep, get out of bed.

? Use the bedroom only for sleeping (no reading, TV, etc.)

? Get up at the same time every morning.

? Don’t nap.

? Ease stress through meditation, progressive muscle relaxation, and other methods.

? Challenge your beliefs about sleep (don’t worry about why you can’t sleep).

? Curb bedroom light and noise.

? Lead a healthy lifestyle.

Studies focused on patients who had been taking sleep drugs. With psychological or behavioral therapy for insomnia, who can’t sleep, those patients generally cut back their use of the drugs. That doesn’t mean they all got great sleep every night. But their results were better than insomnia patients who didn’t get the therapies.

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