If you’re like everyone else, you have good nights and bad nights. The fact is, you can’t fall asleep when you’re supposed to. But, you fall asleep when you’re not supposed to, like at work and while you’re supposed to be spending some quality time with the family. Things get really sticky when you try not to catch up on your sleep. Then, you get cranky and out-of-sorts.

If only you can sleep at night. No need to stress about your night time problems. It’s not like you’re the only one with the same problem. People have been battling with insomnia and end up taking high doses of sedatives, endangering themselves by self medicating. Here’s what you do… don’t self-medicate without knowing exactly what’s going on.

What you need to do is find out what’s keeping you awake. I don’t mean psychiatrist, I mean real tests that tell you a lot about the physiology of your sleeping problems. Sleep disorders involve any difficulties related to sleeping, including difficulty falling or staying asleep, falling asleep at inappropriate times, excessive total sleep time, or abnormal behaviors associated with sleep. The hundreds of various disorders of sleeping and waking can be grouped as follows: difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying awake, difficulty adhering to a regular sleep schedule and sleep disruptive behavior.

Some diagnostic sleep studies provided by physicians are easy enough to understand. The most common are the ones that watch what happens to the body during sleep. The most common sleep studies or diagnostic procedures include the Polysomnogram, Multiple Sleep Latency Test (MSLT) and Multiple Wake Test (MWT).

You may be requested to take polysomnograms to investigate your sleep patterns. You may have to do this in the sleep laboratory. During this time, you will be told not to drink or eat anything that could disrupt your test, such as naps, coffee and alcohol. This test is significant because it records several body functions during sleep.

When you’re inside a sleeping room, some monitoring devices will be hooked on you. This is merely a way to collect information. The sensors all over your body will tell the doctors about your brain waves (EEG activity), heart rate (EKG), eye movements, leg muscle activity, and chest and stomach movement during sleep. The way air flows out from your nose and mouth will also be monitored. Most of all, your blood oxygen level will be monitored using sensors that are clipped on to your finger.

For special cases, other factors may be monitored. A series of wavefront tracings will be the output of the test and your doctor can consult with you to tell you about the score for your test. This diagnostic process could just save your life in the long run. Fortunately it ends around six o’clock in the morning and you can return to your usual daytime routine.

There are other tests you can take such as the MSLT test, which measures how long it takes for a person to fall asleep during naps taken over the course of a day; and the multiple wake test, which measures the ability to stay awake for a duration and is given during the day;

Insomnia is not just caused by stressed. It’s more complicated than that. Most of the time, it’s the lack of sleep that’s causing stress, as millions of homes in the USA know well. Each night, the dreaded enemy is sleep apnea, which is characterized by snoring, excessive turning and tossing and even waking up in the middle of the night unable to breathe. The symptoms I have described so far sums up what sleep apnea does to the body which causes sleeplessness, what we’re going to talk about in the rest of the article is why sleep apnea happens and how you can cure it.

Snoring can be a risk factor of sleep apnea. It’s not just something that disturbs others or makes you self-conscious when someone tells you the next morning how loudly you snored. You may be at risk of breathing problems during sleep, and that could be dangerous.

Sleep apnea happens if you have trouble breathing at night for 10 seconds or more. If this happens more than once during the night, you will find yourself lethargic and sluggish the next morning. Some research say that being overweight is a risk factor of sleep apnea.

Sleep apnea happens because your brain goes into panic mode if your breathing becomes irregular. Your brain receives signals from various places on your body because you’re lacking oxygen. Some people who experience sleep apnea find themselves gasping for breath right after they wake up in the middle of the night. Sometimes, the experience is so rattling that sleep may not come anymore for the rest of the night.

If you show some of these symptoms, you have to confirm with a doctor whether you’re suffering from sleep apnea. Your health care provider can recommend a few tips on how to deal with sleep apnea and finally get the good night sleep you need.

You may think that sleep apnea is something temporary, but there are some long term repercussions. For instance, your lack of sleep may lead to memory loss, inability to focus and constant fatigue. These problems become the cause of stress, not to mention heartache if you mess up at your job. Over time, excessive snoring could also lead to complications in your circulation, especially if your body doesn’t regularly get the supply of oxygen it needs. The scary thing is that children are not spared from sleep apnea, which is commonly caused by tonsillar hypertrophy.

Treatment of Sleep Apnea may range from oral appliances to surgery (Uvulopalatopharyngoplasty). There may even be some behavioural treatments involved. The objective of any sleep apnea treatment is to keep the airway open and prevent breathing blocks that may be caused by positioning on the bed, chemical depressants or anything else. Sufferers are often told never to drink alcohol or take CNS depressants close to bedtime. Even if your body is in autopilot mode during sleep, you still need all your systems functioning well so that you can avoid complications.

Weight reduction and sleep posture modification are also some long-term solutions for sleep apnea. Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) is an effective treatment that is non-invasive. This has been proven to eliminate snoring and prevent sleep apnea. You will be using a machine to gently blow pressurized air through the nasal passage at a pressure high enough to prevent collapsing of the throat during sleep.

Some devices may also be used to keep the lower jaw and the tongue slack enough to allow air to flow in and out freely during sleep. Most of these devices function to prevent the tongue from falling back over the airway while you’re resting. A new innovation for curing sleep apnea is radiofrequency ablation (RFA). In this treatment radiofrequency energy is used to remove tissue from the Uvula, soft palate and tongue thereby helping treat Sleep Apnea. Enlarged tonsils or adenoids is one of the most widely done procedures to rid an individual of sleep apnea.