5 Things People With Chronic Insomnia Want You To Know

Insomnia is the most well known sleep disorder ? affecting as many as 10 percent of all Americans, according to estimates. It’s simply characterized by having trouble either falling asleep or staying asleep. For people who suffer from chronic insomnia, that means at least three nights of troubled sleep per week that lasts for at least three months in a row.

But if you’ve never experienced it, you probably don’t truly understand what insomnia feels like.

“[There] are really long and upsetting nights,” Susan Rutigliano, a 32-year-old from New York City who has struggled with insomnia since she was 17, told The Huffington Post.

“Those are the nights where its just you alone with your thoughts, crippling exhaustion and just waiting for the sun to come up so you can start getting ready to go to work and feel like hell the entire day.”

Sleep medicine doctors prescribe a specific type of psychotherapy to help people with insomnia ? and there are also several medications approved to help people who struggle with insomnia (though they are known to come with a host of unpleasant and sometimes scary side effects).

But that doesn’t mean the trek to more restful nights of sleep for people with chronic insomnia is easy ? or that those therapies always work for everyone.

“[Those people can] get stuck in this cycle of not sleeping well ? which can last for decades if left untreated,” Philip Gehrman, assistant professor of psychology in the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, previously told HuffPost.

Other things that cause (and/or perpetuate) insomnia can include neurological conditions, chronic pain, allerties, gastrointestinal problems, anxiety, depression or unhealthy sleep habits ? staking naps at odd hours, keeping an irregular sleep schedule, using a computer or looking at some other kind of bright screen before bed or drinking too much alcohol or caffeine close to bedtime.

We asked members of our HuffPost Lifestyle Facebook community who struggle with chronic insomnia what they wished everyone else knew about how their restless nights affects their lives. Here’s what they said:

1. It affects every aspect of your day-to-day life.

“Its a really depressing condition to deal with,” Rutigliano. “It [affects] every aspect of your day-to-day life.”

“Even today it still creeps up on me sometimes despite being mostly under control. I have found that for me a combination of working closely with my doctor and taking medications AS PRESCRIBED as well as trying to have some kind of relaxing night time routine is my best defense,” she added.