It is important to take note that when we talk about sleeping disorders, we are not only referring to difficulties falling asleep (since many of us tend to equate the term ‘sleeping disorder with the inability to fall asleep); as there is a great variety of sleeping disorders beyond insomnia, though admittedly, insomnia is probably the commonest of sleeping disorders. These other sleeping disorders beyond insomnia include those where a person has no difficult falling asleep, but rather in waking up, and those odds ones like narcolepsy, a sleeping disorder in which the person finds themselves just (spontaneously)falling asleep even at the most in the most inappropriate of venues and times.
Treatments for sleeping disorders, depending on what they entail, can be seen as falling into three major categories, namely rehabilitative sleeping disorder treatments, pharmacological sleeping disorder treatments and psychotherapeutic sleeping disorder treatments.
Rehabilitation is used in the treatment of sleeping disorders whose root can be traced to faulty long term sleeping habits – like where a person develops the habits of sleeping at socially unacceptable times during their youth, only for that habit to turn into a liability in their adulthood. Here, the sleeping disorder does not have any major biochemical root, and all that is required is essentially to reset the patient’s biological clock by focused change of habits, and thereby restore healthy sleeping habits.
Psychotherapeutic treatments sleeping disorders, on the other hand, get their efficacy from the fact that many sleeping disorders occur due to psychological illnesses such as depression (which typically manifests as either too much sleep or inability falling asleep), and which is best treated through psychotherapy as a first line of treatment, before resorting to medication if psychotherapy proves inadequate.
And medication is used in the treatment of sleeping disorders in which there seems to be a clear case of biochemical deficiency (seeing that sleep is governed by intricate biochemical processes); and where it is clear that the use of psychotherapy or rehabilitation will not be adequate in the treatment of the sleeping disorder.
The author has written more articles about how to stop snoring while sleeping at how to sleep better at night.
