In a recent study, researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University discovered that your parents are partly responsible for your insomnia.

In fact, you can possibly blame your parents for 50% of your insomnia suffering.

It happens in a different way than you may think, though, and we don’t actually want you to blame your parents. Because after all, it’s not their fault.

Insomnia seems to be a complex problem with a variety of causes. A research team at Virginia Commonwealth University has just added another one into the mix: genetic inheritance.

Their study is published in the September 2015 edition of the journal Sleep.

For environmental and health details, they consulted the Virginia Adult Twin Studies of Psychiatric and Substance Use Disorders, a database of 7,500 people, all born as part of twins. They then tracked the twins down and asked them to complete two surveys on insomnia symptoms over time.

With all this information available, they could calculate the extent to which genetics contributed to insomnia. After keeping environmental influences constant, they estimated that the heritability of insomnia was around 59 percent for women and 38 percent for men.

In other words, if you are an insomniac, the chance that you inherited your insomnia symptoms from your parents is 59 percent if you are female and 38 percent if you are male. To look at this differently, the chance that you will pass on your insomnia to your girl and boy children is 59 percent and 38 percent respectively.

If you like positive thinking – and don’t we all – you can hold onto the 41 and 62 percent role that environmental factors play in producing insomnia. Even better, the results of the study suggest you can change your inherited insomnia by manipulating your environment.

Before they put the raw data through a longitudinal model, which roughly involves generalizing from the collected adulthood insomnia scores to probable childhood insomnia scores, they found that insomnia was at most 25 percent inheritable, and that there was almost no difference between men and women.

What does this mean?

By the time you are an adult, you can manipulate your environment so much that there is only a 25 percent chance that you will struggle with inherited insomnia symptoms. It also means that women are particularly brilliant at these environmental manipulations, as there is a much bigger inheritance for them to wipe out by the time they are adults.

The best news of the day is that you CAN overcome insomnia no matter what your genetic structure may be. Here is the simplest trick I know to fall asleep and sleep through the night, every single night of the year…