No matter how good the schedule is, nothing replaces sleeping when your body clock actually wants you to sleep.

Basically we have a tiny little gland in the middle of our brains that controls when we sleep and when we are awake as well as many other things. And many of us are programmed, as it were, to either be night owls (want to go to sleep late) or larks, where we want to go to bed early.

This problem often begins in people when they're in their mid-teens.

For example, people with heart failure develop a breathing pattern where they stop breathing (at different times) throughout the entire night. That actually wakes them up repetitively and so people with heart failure will have trouble falling asleep and they'll wake up sometimes very short of breath.

Insomnia is really a symptom (not a disease). It's really something someone complains to a doctor about. And sometimes the person that complains about insomnia doesn't even have it. In other words they can fall (asleep) very, very quickly but their perception is that it took them a long time to fall asleep.

To get a good night's sleep, you have to understand there's a mind and body connection. Both the mind, as well as the body, need to relax.