Many people suffer from lack of sleep in their lives, sometimes this is caused by a demanding job, family life, or social life, other times is is caused by an underlying problem or sleeping disorder. Identifying whether you are actually suffering from a sleeping disorder or simply burning the candle at both ends is the first step to getting more sleep back in your life.

The first thing to do is to look at your average day. What time do you get up? Do you have time for breakfast, are you running from meeting to meeting, trying to catch up on phone calls and emails inbetween. Are you grabbing sugary snacks and caffeinated drinks on the run to try and keep yourself going, then rather than going home when you are finally done do you find yourself either attending client dinners or functions or just hitting the bar with your colleagues to get over the day? You spend your day bouncing from sugar rush to sugar rush to try and avoid the slump that follows. When you finally get home at night your body is exhausted and your mind is racing from the days events and the sugar overload it has been subjected to. You then have to deal with your home life, bills to pay, washing to do, shopping to do, food to cook - although in reality you are just going to sling a ready meal in the microwave and slump in front of the TV for a couple of hours.

When you head finally hits the pillow and everything goes quiet your mind starts to race with all the things you didn't get done today so are going to have to do tomorrow, then you start to stress about tomorrow and you are finding it impossible to go to sleep. It's time to reach for the sleeping pills to try and get you off to sleep, even though you swore to yourself you When you finally drift off it seems like the alarm clock goes off and it is time to start all over again - first things first, a mega shot of caffeine to get you going.

If you are nodding as you are reading this then you aren't suffering from a sleeping disorder - you are simply running yourself ragged, trying to survive on sugar and caffeine and not giving your body a chance to stop and recover and refresh itself ready for the next day. It will only be a matter of time before this kind of lifestyle seriously catches up with you and you are running a serious risk of making yourself ill.