Yoga has recently been used as a popular treatment for insomnia.  Essentially speaking, it involves the whole body and produces a relaxing effect while also simultaneously actually energizing the body.  It has been used quite frankly because with all the reasons for insomnia, the treatments can be just as bad.  They can leave you groggy, losing REM sleep, and also becoming dependent or addicted in general. 

This is not something that really appeals to most individuals in general terms.  It is not addictive at all in terms of yoga, and it has been known to be used for thousands of years already.  This ancient system also allows you to breathe better, and specifically speaking, some experts recommend that you use what’s called the sun salutation, which you can learn by talking to an instructor or by watching a YouTube video of course depending on your wants and needs. 

Either way, yoga has presented itself as a viable alternative to the undesirable sleeping pills of yesterday or even other natural treatments that involve pills in general.  It doesn’t work for everybody, and frankly some people will need sleeping pills, whether natural or prescription.  But it is certainly worth trying it only for all its other possible benefits that are unnamed here.

Insomnia is an elusive disease, as many have learned.  Some people take sleeping pills to deal with it.  But there is a disease called Fatal Familial Insomnia that is an extremely rare disease found in the brain.  It is abbreviated to FFI, and it is essentially found in a few people including an Italian family that descended from a man who lived 250 years ago.  His was the first case known, and in the 1990’s researchers found that it is caused by a dual gene mutation. 

It is a prion protein which results in an insoluble prion protein that regulates sleep.  In the Italian family’s case, it usually activates itself at the age of 40, and from there they just stop sleeping.  In this case, sleeping pills don’t help, and eventually they lose basic functioning skills and also eventually die of it.  When someone has this disease, they have a 50% chance of passing it onto their children, which makes it relatively common in the grand scheme of things. 

But only 40 families are actually said to have this gene running through their lines.  It has 4 stages that include insomnia resulting in panic attacks over time, and it lasts about 4 months.  Then they begin to experience hallucinations.  This is usually about 5 months.  Step 3 means they are completely unable to sleep no matter what they do, and they quickly lose weight for about 3 months.  Finally, it causes dementia and it lasts about 6 months until they die.  As you can see, this is a very unpleasant side of insomnia.