Insomnia is classified as a sleep disorder. This is a common problem believed to regularly affect a third of people in the UK and is particularly common among older people. This is where you struggle to fall asleep or stay asleep long enough to feel rested the next morning, or wake up too early. Sleep duration and efficiency are important. Insomnia can be transient, intermittent or long-term. One type of insomnia is short-term insomnia, which tends to be caused by immediate worries such as exams, the death of a family member, or jet lag. Some people experience short-term insomnia for a short time, usually a few days or weeks. The second type of insomnia is long-term insomnia; Chronic insomnia describes difficulty sleeping for more than four weeks. This type of insomnia can be classified into primary and secondary insomnia. Primary insomnia occurs when a person has sleep problems that are not directly associated with other health problems or physical causes. For example, a person may feel stressed or depressed, but these states are not the cause of insomnia. They may have developed poor sleeping habits, but insomnia is the only problem. Sometimes insomnia may have an initial cause, but that has gone away, but the insomnia persists because the person expects sleep problems. Finally, secondary insomnia occurs when a person has problems sleeping due to underlying medical, psychiatric, or environmental causes. This type of insomnia is typical for people who work shifts or suffer from circadian rhythm disorders. Older people tend to suffer from it because of the discomfort they experience while sleeping, for example due to rheumatism. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay It is very important to distinguish between primary and secondary insomnia because of the treatment implications. It may not be simple to determine the cause of insomnia because we may not know, for example, whether stress causes insomnia or whether insomnia causes stress. If insomnia is a symptom of another disorder, then it is important to treat the disorder rather than just the insomnia. For example, if insomnia is the result of chronic depression, it would not be helpful to simply treat the symptom. Ohayon and Roth studied 15,000 Europeans and found that insomnia preceded rather than followed mood disorders such as depression. This means that it is more common for insomnia to be caused by one disorder rather than another disorder. Chronic insomnia is very complex and is unlikely to be explained by a single factor. The large number of factors that can contribute to a person's insomnia makes it very difficult to conduct meaningful research, as research tends to find only small effects. This means that research is unlikely to find clear solutions to the problem, although it is possible that primary insomnia is caused by a person's belief that they will have difficulty sleeping. This expectation becomes self-fulfilling because the person is tense when trying to sleep. One way to deal with this problem is to use a method based on attribution theory; the insomniac has learned to attribute his sleep difficulties to insomnia. If they are convinced that the source of the difficulties lies elsewhere, then they will put an end to their dysfunctional attribution. The cognitive approach focuses on thoughts.