The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It

by W. Chris Winter

I would remind you that a difficult night of sleep from time to time is okay. It’s part of the human condition, so to speak. We have really bad breakups with girlfriends. Our pet rabbits die unexpectedly. Fantasy football quarterbacks underperform on Monday Night Football. To put it bluntly: Shit happens. If that difficulty is happening more than what you like or can tolerate, you are halfway to having insomnia. An individual who cares, and cares a lot. Having difficulty with your sleep from time to time is not insomnia. To truly have insomnia, that difficulty sleeping has to bother you, annoy you, really get under your skin. It was shown in an interesting 2012 study that insomnia patients remember their bad nights of sleep more than their good nights. This selective memory is often on display when I ask a patient how her sleep has been since her last visit two months earlier. “Terrible” is the reply, but after looking at her sleep diaries, I see there are often more good nights than bad. For some insomnia patients, it is almost as if the good nights had never happened. For healthy sleepers, the opposite is true. They pay little to no attention to the night or two of bad sleep they have.