If you must take sleeping pills, make sure they are taken only temporarily and are a stop-gap measure. The best thing to do is to find out what is causing your sleepless nights and get wholesome solutions for it.
Treating a drug’s side effect with another drug can start a vicious cycle of drug side effects and interactions that can land you in the hospital or even kill you. They create more problems than they solve, sometimes with life-threatening consequences. Remember the sad case of Heath Ledger, the young and very promising actor in the film “The Dark Knight.” Heath apparently had problems sleeping. He claimed he could not sleep for more than two hours at a time. He began to take many sleeping pills and is rumored to have died taking an overdose of a combination of prescription and over-the-counter sleeping pills.
Other commonsense causes of insomnia
The causes of our insomnia are usually sitting right in front of us, in plain view. Here are some of the most common culprits.
Caffeine: Caffeine is, without doubt, the number one cause of insomnia, especially with those of you who can’t resist an afternoon cappuccino. You may not realise that many soft drinks have caffeine in them. The same goes for many energy drinks. Most soft drinks are loaded with caffeine. Try holding off on the caffeine after the noon time for a few weeks, and see what happens. Again, if you find that you are one of the people who is affected by the caffeine in soft drinks, don’t take them after 4pm.
Some people cannot even take decaffeinated coffee in the morning without having sleepless nights! I am one of those. After keeping off both coffee and tea for some time, I tried taking decaffeinated coffee with Coffee Mate. I couldn’t resist the creamy taste. I found I couldn’t sleep. Once I left the coffee, I slept better. I now drink only herbal teas.
Diet and “energy” pills and supplements often contain caffeine, ephedra, amino acids and other stimulants that can keep you awake at night.
Too much alcohol: A glass of wine with dinner can be relaxing, but too much alcohol will keep you tossing and turning. You may fall asleep but wake up after a few hours and will be unable to sleep again.
Sedentary lifestyle: Couch potatoes often find themselves clutching the remote control into the wee hours. Exercise is one of the best sleep remedies I know of. A brisk 20-minute walk or any type of enjoyable exercise (preferably outdoors) sometime before 9p.m. can be just the ticket. Exercise is also a good remedy for stress-induced tension, which can leave you lying awake worrying instead of sleeping.
Enlarged prostate: Older men with benign prostate hypertrophy or BPH who have to get up many times during the night can often get relief with a Saw Palmetto supplement combined with zinc and selenium (follow directions on the container). If that doesn’t do the job, try a pea-sized dab of progesterone cream every day, using a progesterone cream that contains 450mg to 500mg of progesterone per ounce. I am told that most men over the age of 65 can benefit from a little bit of progesterone cream.
What about melatonin? Melatonin is a hormone secreted by the pineal gland in the brain in response to darkness. Its message to the body is, “Time for sleep.” As we age, we produce less and less melatonin, and this may be a primary cause of the sleep problems so common among older people. Sleep in complete darkness to enhance your production of melatonin. Get curtains that will completely block out the street and other neighbourhood lights.
Also, get masking tape to cover night lights on electrical gadgets in your room or get the electrician to remove these lights.
If you’re past middle age and you have incorporated these commonsense sleep aids and you are still not getting enough sleep, you can try taking a melatonin supplement an hour before bed. You don’t need much melatonin to have an effect — anywhere from 0.5 to 5mg is plenty. If melatonin deficiency is your problem, you may sleep better the first night you take it. But do not take melatonin supplements if you are not ready to rest.
Melatonin will make you sleepy and encourage your body to fall asleep. Take it one hour or so before you plan to go to sleep and never before driving or operating machinery. You should also make sure you have plenty of time to sleep while the melatonin is in your system.
Again, don’t take it for more than two weeks. Two weeks is a sufficient amount of time to get the body back into a natural sleep rhythm so you can get the rest you need. Taking melatonin for a longer period of time will cause your body to become tolerant to the supplement and it will become less effective, leading you to take more and more.
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