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;