This allowed him to overcome his sleep problems.

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It was night and day for Martina Keller* (55). The lawyer processes claims for an insurance company at work. “As soon as I closed my eyes in the evening, fate reappeared,” she says. The mother who accidentally passed over her child. Or the motorcyclist who died in an accident and left his family behind.

Keller suffered from insomnia for years. What shouldn’t have taken more than 30 minutes took hours for him. Daily life has become a challenge. “I was constantly tired and sluggish, I didn’t have the energy to do anything.” The worse the day, the more afraid of the night. Vicious circle. He is not alone in this.

20 percent suffer from sleep apnea

“80 percent of the population has at least one period in their life where they don’t sleep well,” says Chief Physician Sebastian Zaremba, 42. He sits in his office at the Zurzach Sleep Medicine Care Clinic in Lucerne. Our circumstances are guilty, so we sleep worse. “Today, we have to be available around the clock and work constantly,” says Zaremba.

Along with the number of sleeping sicknesses, there is awareness of them. For example, for sleep apnea, where breathing stops during sleep. Usually hundreds of times a night. With each brief awakening, you no longer remember the morning. About 20 percent of the population, mostly men, suffer from it, mostly unknowingly.

Or insomnia, the second most common illness in which a person cannot sleep, fall asleep or wake up too early. Women are twice as likely to be affected.

Why do we need sleep?

The condition in which we spend a third of our lives is surprisingly under-researched, and sleep medicine is a young field. What science knows: The body goes through four sleep stages, which it repeats in cycles. REM sleep, also known as the falling asleep phase, light sleep, deep sleep, and dream sleep.

Deep sleep is the best medicine: the body renews itself, the immune system fights viruses and bacteria, damaged cells are repaired, growth hormones are formed for cell renewal. Experiences and learning are transferred to long-term memory.

In REM sleep, as we process the events of the day in this dream phase, the heart rate fluctuates and blood pressure rises. In the long term, if we sleep less than six hours a day, the risk of developing cardiovascular disease increases. Life expectancy is falling.

“You have to work hard on yourself”

Keller has now found a way to solve her difficulty falling asleep: with relaxation exercises she learned in hypnotherapy. He sleeps about seven hours a night today. Would you like it to be longer? No: “Now that I’m not tired all the time, I finally want to get something out of the day.”

* Name changed

Source : Blick