Insomnia
Insomnia means you regularly have problems sleeping. It usually gets better by changing your sleeping habits.
The basics of insomnia
We live in sleep depriving times. Around 3 in 4 people with sleep trouble have a trigger, e.g. bereavement, job loss, work stress, financial stress. All of these are common.
The good news? Most resolve within a few weeks. For those that don't there is help. Sleepstation is an online CBT based sleep therapy course. It has an excellent success rate.
For general advice on getting better sleep, check out the NHS website here.
Sleeping tablets
Sleeping tablets (sedatives) are not very often prescribed for insomnia, particularly if your insomnia is not due to a external trigger (job loss, bereavement etc).
People quickly become tolerant of sleeping tablets. This means you need higher and higher doses to get to sleep which often leads to addiction - and perversely - more trouble sleeping.
In the 60s and 70s when the drugs were first discovered they were widely prescribed. Sadly this created a generation suffering with addiction. We have learnt the hard way that the risks of these medicines out weigh the benefits in most cases.