Name three reasons you miss sleep. Here’s a check list. Pick your faves: 1) too much to do, 2) got to bed late, 3) ate too much dinner, 4) awakened in the night thinking about work and couldn’t go back to sleep, 5) noises outside, 6) had to set the alarm early to prepare for something…Sound familiar?

Worry is one of the big reported causes of sleeplessness. Many people prefer to call it “thinking.” Worry falls into three time frames: 1) either people lie awake unable to fall asleep, 2) or they fall asleep but awaken in the night because of a noise or to take a bio break, then can’t resume sleep; or 3) they awaken too early in the morning and can’t fall back asleep. Less frequent is having two or three of these conditions (except under extreme stress). Typically, worry would not be characterized as a sleep disorder, but rather a sleep disruption.

Sleep disorders, per se¸ have a medical or physiological tie-in. To get a handle on sleep disorders, think of them as falling into two categories: internally stimulated or externally stimulated. Internally provoked causes sleeplessness cover everything from run-away thinking to a full bladder.

Externally provoked wakefulness during sleep times covers things like loud noises, interruptions, bright lights, etc.

You immediately see from this simple breakdown there are a few things about getting a good night’s sleep that are fairly easy to control under most circumstances. For the most part, stimuli causing wakefulness that you can prevent or control without medication would fall under experiential insomnia, not sleep disorders.

Internally triggered sleeplessness, however, is more complex than pulling dark shades or plugging in your white noise machine. Internal causes are further broken down into voluntary and involuntary, for lack of better terms. For example, we could make a case that worrying all night is voluntary. Of course, you feel like it isn’t, especially at the time. But you could choose to think about butterflies and balmy lake breezes rather than how you are going to get 17 non-productive people in the department you just took over to start performing up to par. Neurological disorders, on the other hand, would clearly be involuntary—and a disorder, not merely insomnia.