Sleep isn't always as easy as babies make it look.

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According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, more than 30 percent of adults have
experienced insomnia in some form. But when it comes to symptoms, causes, and treatments,
the disorder is far from one-size-fits-all. Read on to find out more about what it is, what to do
about it, and why you shouldn’t try out Vincent van Gogh’s go-to insomnia cure for yourself.

1. There’s more than one type of insomnia.

Difficulty drifting off at the start of the night—called sleep onset insomnia—is probably what
many people think of when they hear the word insomnia. But it’s not the only kind. If you
find yourself waking up throughout the night and having a tough time falling back asleep,
that’s sleep maintenance insomnia. And if you often wake up much earlier than you need to
and can’t fall back asleep, you may have early morning awakening insomnia (according to
the Sleep Foundation, this is sometimes considered a subset of sleep maintenance insomnia
rather than its own category).

Insomnia can be labeled by how many nights it lasts, too. Chronic insomnia describes sleep
struggles that occur at least three nights every week over a three-month period or longer.
Anything less than that is usually considered acute insomnia (also called short-term insomnia
or adjustment insomnia).

2. Insomnia symptoms can go beyond trouble falling

asleep.
The ways that an insomnia-related lack of sleep can affect you during waking hours are also
considered symptoms of insomnia. This could be as simple as feeling drowsy or tired during
the day. Or, as the Mayo Clinic explains, you may experience “irritability, depression or
anxiety,” “difficulty paying attention, focusing on tasks or remembering,” “increased errors
or accidents,” and/or “ongoing worries about sleep.”

3. Some insomnia causes are habit-related.

That afternoon flat white might not help you in the long run.djgunner/iStock via Getty
Images

Drinking caffeinated beverages too late in the day, staring at your phone (or any screen)
while you’re trying to fall asleep, or having a large meal right before bed can cause insomnia.
If you habitually have alcohol before bed to help you drift off, it could be doing more harm
than good—alcohol can inhibit REM sleep and prevent you from staying asleep throughout
the night.

A person’s insomnia may also be related to a preexisting medical issue. This could be another
sleep disorder, like sleep apnea or restless legs syndrome; a mental health disorder like
anxiety, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder; or a condition like asthma, chronic
pain, or Parkinson’s disease. Medications taken to treat those issues may also contribute to
insomnia.

Stress is another very common cause of insomnia, whether it’s brought on by worries about
regular parts of life—money, work, relationships, etc.—or a specific traumatic event, like
losing your job or a death in the family.

4. Fatal familial insomnia is—true to its name—a deadly

sleep disorder.
The usual cause of fatal familial insomnia (FFI), on the other hand, is an abnormal variant in
the PRNP (prion protein) gene. Basically, the variant causes prion proteins to fold
improperly, which build up in the thalamus and start to knock out nerve cells. One of the
main symptoms of this brain damage is insomnia, which often intensifies over a period of
months. FFI is a rare degenerative disease—but it is deadly. According to NIH's Genetic and
Rare Disease Information Center, patients usually pass away somewhere between six months
and three years after onset.

5. Not all insomnia treatment involves sleeping pills.

There’s no dearth of medication on the market that may alleviate your insomnia, from
prescription sleeping pills like Lunesta and Ambien to over-the-counter supplements like
melatonin. But while medication can help you sleep on a night-by-night basis, it won’t help
you identify what’s causing your insomnia and cut it off at the source.

Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) can. As the Mayo Clinic explains, “the
cognitive part of CBT-I teaches you to recognize and change beliefs that affect your ability to
sleep,” while the behavioral part “helps you develop good sleep habits and avoid behaviors
that keep you from sleeping well.” Since all those elements vary from person to person, a
sleep therapist will work with you to devise a personalized course of action. This could mean
improving your “sleep hygiene,” which involves making lifestyle changes like decreasing
caffeine consumption or increasing exercise; learning meditation and muscle relaxation
techniques; or trying any of these other common CBT-I methods.

6. Historical cures for insomnia included dog earwax and

dormouse fat.
"Dormouse what on your feet?"LenSoMy/iStock via Getty Images

Some ancient Romans thought rubbing dormouse fat on your feet could help you sleep. Not
an appealing prospect, but also not as bad as Renaissance mathematician Gerolamo
Cardano’s recommendation that insomniacs coat their teeth with dog earwax. Another old
insomnia “cure” was a concoction containing bile from a castrated boar (along with opium,
which definitely helped more than the boar’s contribution).

7. A few people have claimed to have functioned fine for

decades with no sleep.
In 1915, a Hungarian soldier named Paul Kern suffered a bullet wound to the head while
fighting in World War I, after which he was allegedly never able to sleep again. “Curiously,
apart from an occasional headache, M. Kern suffers no ill effects. He has not gone to bed for
years, and his work reveals not the slightest signs of deterioration,” The Adelaide Chronicle
wrote in 1930. Kern lived until 1955. New Jersey’s Albert Herpin—who died in his nineties
in 1947—and Thái Ngọc, a Vietnamese farmer who’s now in his late seventies, have both
also made headlines for surviving decades supposedly without sleeping a wink.

It’s unclear whether those men were true medical anomalies, intentional exaggerators, or just
unaware that they were, in fact, occasionally asleep. Often, people who go too long without
sleeping start “microsleeping”—falling asleep for seconds at a time without even realizing it.
If you tried to avoid sleep for as long as possible, it would likely only take a few days for it to
seriously affect your cognitive and motor abilities. The world record for sleeplessness is just
264 hours—about 11 days—and record-setter Randy Gardner started hallucinating not even
halfway into it.

8. Franz Kafka and Vincent van Gogh both suffered from

insomnia.
Franz Kafka, Vincent van Gogh, Abraham Lincoln, Marilyn Monroe, Groucho Marx, and
Margaret Thatcher are several of many prominent figures who sometimes struggled to sleep.
“Sleepless night. The third in a row,” Kafka wrote in his diary on October 2, 1911. “I fall
asleep soundly but after an hour I wake up, as though I had laid my head in the wrong hole.”

Van Gogh mentioned his issues with insomnia in a letter to his brother, Theo, from January 9,
1889—just weeks after he cut off his ear. “Physically I am well,” he wrote. “What is to be
feared most is insomnia, and the doctor has not spoken about it to me, nor have I spoken of it
to him either. But I am fighting it myself.” His self-administered treatment was “a very, very
strong dose of camphor in my pillow and mattress.” (Camphor can be toxic or even fatal
when ingested, so don’t follow van Gogh’s lead on this.)