Semisomnia You have all heard of insomnia and indeed many of you may actually suffer from insomnia for one reason or another. However Insomnia is a medical diagnosis with specific diagnostic criteria and so people who are just sleeping poorly or feeling a bit jaded during the day may claim to have insomnia when strictly speaking they do not. So, a few years ago I coined the phrase ‘semisomnia’ to describe the everyday poor sleep and low grade exhaustion and sleepiness during the day that most of us experience on a regular basis. Honestly answer the question ‘how do you feel during the day on a scale of 1 to 10?’, where 1 is that you have an irresistible desire to fall asleep and 10 you are the most awake you have ever been. No I can pretty much bet that none of you are going to be 10, but what is perhaps more worrying is that I also doubt that many of you will be an 8 or 9, (although I know some of you think you are very awake but that is because you have fooled yourself into believing this to get you through the day. Honestly look at how you feel, is this the best you could be? If so, I would suggest a lifestyle change!). So why are you going through each day at less than your full potential? Most likely it is because you are not sleeping well. And because you don’t feel good during the day, you spend time, and indeed money, on trying to feel good; the multi-vitamin pill to supposedly keep you healthy, the cup of coffee to get you going, the chocolate bar as a treat because you don’t feel good, the ‘energy’ pill/drink to give you a boost during the day, the glass of wine to help you relax. At the end of the week you treat yourself to a spa treatment and you cannot wait for your holiday when you can finally relax. Just imagine how much better life would be and how much more productive you would be if each day you were at your best. The good news is that there is something that could make you feel good and look good each and every day and it is simply getting good sleep.