If you’re having troubles with sleeping, you most likely lose that pleasant morning-mood; you feel restless or in other words cause impairments of your daily functioning. But there is a bigger issue than that. Insomnia poses risks to your over-all health that could be considered detrimental if not acted upon.
Insomnia is characterized as the problem of not falling to sleep. There is a great difference on the physical and psychological aspect of persons who have poor quality sleep compared to those sound-sleepers. Off course, poor sleepers are the ones who are very negatively affected and will most likely acquire health risks. Studies were conducted to assess the health risks associated with poor sleepers vs sound sleepers.
The Sleep Research and Treatment Center in Penn State College of Medicine randomly selected adults in Central Pennsylvania that agreed to be examined in a sleep laboratory. After collating the data out from the questionnaires, the respondents are classified into the following:
- 70% are normal sleepers (at least 6 hours of sleep)
- 8% had chronic insomnia, with signs persisting for almost 1 year
- 22% were poor sleepers who have trouble sleeping and or staying awake a night
The findings of the sleep assessment, which is published on the sleep journal, April issue, are the following health risks:
Hypertension – those who slept five hours or less at night and had history of insomnia will have five times the tendency of having hypertension than those normal sleepers.
High blood Pressure – people will have 3.5 more tendency of acquiring this disease if have slept 5 to 6 hours a night as their usual sleeping pattern compared to normal sleepers.
But those with insomnia and still has six hours sleep has similar risks to normal sleepers, the researchers also concluded that eight to ten percent have high risks for high blood pressure attributed to chronic insomnia. Aside from these, there are psychiatric disorders that will likely occur such as depression that can really affect one’s psychological being.
Insomnia is but a serious syndrome that needs to be diagnosed or treated right away to prevent all other risks that it can trigger and that may damage the functioning of one being.
