Sleep Disorders

[Brendon Fulton]

What role do you think that stress plays in insomnia?

Find a study that looks at this link between stress and an inability to fall asleep and/or maintain sleep and give the details of the study below...

[danny]

If you are a practising therapist, you will know that one of the most common presenting symptoms of stress is insomnia. It may, however, surprise you to know exactly how common it is: an estimated one third of the population will suffer from insomnia at some stage in their lives. This is not to say that all these people will be suffering from stress – although I would point out that a recent survey indicated that a horrendous one in five people suffer from stress generated by their work or workplace – but the fact remains that insomnia is a massive problem, and that a high proportion of these incidences may be caused by stress inducing situations.


I believe that as the statistics show, insomnia is a key symptom of stress and work related stress which is one of the main causes of overall stress clearly plays a key factor into the lives of people and the ability they have to sleep. Stress has a direct positive correlation to insomnia as the higher stress we have to deal with the worse our sleep is and the more likely we are to suffer from insomnia (exluding individual differences as there are always some exceptions)

[Brendon Fulton]

Thanks Danny - be nice to read your own "learned" perspective rather than a copy/paste job. Some good info though...

Also - please don't forget to quote, cite or link to an actual study on the relationship between stress & insomnia.

[dthorn]

I think that stress plays a vital role in insomnia.
According to www.health-concern.com/Articles/insomnia_and_stress.htm, it is very common and apparently one in three people suffer from stress-related insomnia.
Not being able to sleep or maintain sleep because you are stressing over your job would in turn cause you to be tired and would affect your work, which would make you more stressed and it becomes a vicous circle until it becomes more serious and could eventually cause the individual the suffer from clinical depression.
This can easily be avoided though if you catch it early and see your GP who will probably refer you to a psychaiatrist.

[amara002]

Stress plays a huge roll in the amount of people that suffer from insomnia, statistics show that one in three of us will suffer from insomnia and one in five may suffer from work-related stress. High amounts of arousal which come from stress cause the inability to sleep.

Morin, Rodrigue and ivers conducted an experiment that examined the roll of stressful life events in the causation of primary insomnia. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12651993
They concluded that the key factor in insomnia was the way people thought about the stressors and the perceived lack of control overstressful events rather than the amount of them.

[Brendon Fulton]

Excellent find there Adam - a good study.

Interesting to note that it was not the actual stressful events that seemed to cause insomnia, but rather individual differences in so much as how different partidipants viewed and were impacted by stressful events.

This seems to show that it is more about personality (how people handle stress) than external stressful impacts - discuss...

[juppg001]

One type of insomnia is known as chronic insomnia. The word chronic to me means long lasting for example a chronic job could be working in the stock exchange my point is the word chronic means on going so in my own opinion I feel that stress is a strong causer of chronic insomnia. An example of this would be having a business going into remission the manager may not sleep at night because he may have a family to provide for. In my own opinion i do not believe that there is a way of handling/coping with something like that.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20813580
The link above is a experiment which shows that Aerobic exercise improves self-reported sleep and quality of life in older adults with insomnia.
so this experiment shows one way of how to handle insomnia

[danieljacobs]

the link bellow concludes in the study that key factor of insomnia was the way the participants thought about the stressors the more stressful they made the subject the more diffculty they encountered when trying to sleep.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12651993

stress plays a massive part in the number of individuals affected by insomnia, a number of studies show that on average 1 in 4 people will suffer from some sort of insomnia at a certain in there lifetime a number of stressors including work related stress, divorce and bereavement can have a massive influence on how serious the insomnia maybe i.e depending on how well the individual can cope with the stressor plays a big part on how serious the form of insomnia may be. this showing that individual differences play a gigantic role on how stress affects are sleeping patterns.

[Mr Bausor]

Some interesting points are made here and it is great to see some studies being cited. This is really important for the exams.

I know that the main focus is on stress causing insomnia, but the treatment of the disorder is an important consideration too. One of the biggest treatments for insomnia is actually one of the major causes of it - sleeping pills. A number of insomniacs take sleeping pills become addicted or dependent on them in order to sleep as they are part of a group of hypnotic drugs - i.e. they increase feelings of sleepiness. The links below have some more information.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0447.1988.tb06408.x/abstract
www.insomniacs.co.uk/sleeping-pills-addiction-withdrawal.html [/color]