Sleeping pills are useless and dangerous

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As an insomniac, I'm strongly opposed to over-the-counter sleeping pills. If you have chronic sleeping problems, they won’t do you any good. In fact, they’ll probably make your insomnia worse in the long run. I say this partly because of my own experience but also because scientific studies support this claim. I could go on for pages about why you should avoid sleeping pills, but I’ll outline the most important reasons here:

1) Pills don’t treat the root causes. While sleeping pills may help you fall asleep, their effect disappears when you stop taking them. This means that you’ll have to keep on taking them for the rest of your life in order to sleep normally. Click here to get a better idea of what sleeping pills will do to your health in the long run.

2) You get less deep sleep when you take sleeping pills. Deep sleep is the most important and restorative phase of the sleeping cycle, sometimes known as Phase 4. When you fall asleep after a period of insomnia, your body enters Phase 4 immediately to make up for lost sleep. If you take sleeping pills this phase becomes much shorter and you’ll feel terrible the next day – even if it felt as if you slept like a log.

3) Sleeping pills shorten your attention span the day after. Your thinking will become fuzzy and your ability to drive, concentrate and even carry out normal communication with other people will be diminished.

4) You could permanently damage you biological clock. Once your body adapts to less deep sleep, you may be stuck with that long after you stop taking the pills.

So remember, if you’re anxious about something (say, a big presentation the next day), shoving pills down your throat to make yourself sleep is NOT the solution. Take a hot bath and listen to some relaxing music instead ;).

The big pharmaceutical companies are always willing to make a quick buck off desperate people. They will have you believe that sleeping pills are a natural and normal way to induce sleep. Don’t believe them.

Even doctors are slightly unreliable in this area. They have been educated to prescribe pills to insomniacs and they don't really have the time to figure out the deeper root causes of your problem. That's something you'll have to figure out for yourself.

IMPORTANT: This is all based on my own experience; I'm not necessarily telling you to distrust your doctor. But I would certainly advise you to question him about the side effects before taking any sort of medication.

Don’t go to bed when you’re not tired

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Many insomniacs are people who go to bed when they're simply not tired enough. You shouldn't be going to bed if you've still got a lot of energy. It's pointless -- you’ll have to wait hours before you settle down, and your brain will start associating your bed with lying awake. If you think you have too much energy in the evenings, here's my advice:

a) do some intense exercise during the day, preferably in the morning. a 20-minute jog around the block will do the trick; weightlifting is not advised.
b) avoid TV and computers for the last 2 hours before bedtime. Spend the last hour reading a book.

It never seizes to amaze me how people can go to bed at 9.00 or 10.00 PM and complain that they’re not falling asleep fast enough. Of course it’s taking you a long time to sleep – you’re going to bed too early! In my experience it’s much better to get five or six hours of deep sleep, instead of attempting ten hours and getting almost none. This is common sense stuff, really. If it’s taking you hours to fall asleep, estimate the time at which you doze off, and start going to bed at that time instead.

Your bed time does not necessarily have to be fixed, since your degree of tiredness in the evening depends on what happened during the day. However, I’d strongly advise you to keep a fixed waking time, perhaps at 7.00 or 8.00 am. If you don’t keep your waking time fixed, your daily rhythm will start shifting. And that's definitely not a good thing.

The world record for staying awake

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What’s your longest you’ve gone without sleep? I think my personal record was about 72 hours, if not more than that. Some nights I would intentionally keep myself awake in the hope that it would make me sleep better the next night (this is generally not a good strategy). Sleep deprivation can be used as a form of torture, but some people actually enjoy it. In extreme cases it can produce hallucinations and intensify your emotions -- usually for the worse.

As far as I know the world record for sleep deprivation is 11 days and nights. This rather amazing feat was carried out by Tony Wright, a 42 year old man from Cornwall, England. The previous record (of 264 hours) was set way back in 1964, but since then the Guinness Book of World Records has stopped publishing this particular type of record because of the health risk.

Apparently this guy stayed awake by playing a lot of pool and keeping to a strictly raw food diet. Now the real question is, why would a sane man intentionally put himself through such an agonizing experience?

Read more here.

Waking up alert – a possible solution

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My morning routine is hardly impressive. First I wake up, and snooze for at least ten minutes. Then I go endure a sort of inner battle, an intense debate to decide whether I should get out of bed or not. Usually my evil side wins the debate, and I snooze for another ten minutes. Finally I get out of bed, feeling groggy and cursing myself for not being more disciplined.

So how is it that some people can wake up with a bang, while others seem doomed to be morning zombies? Some would say your energy in the morning is related to how enthusiastic you are about life in general. And if you’re a young man, hormones could be part of the problem (e.g. testosterone takes a few hours to kick in properly). But I guess the real question is – what can actually be done about it? Well, there is one idea that seems to have good potential. I'd say it's definitely worth a shot.

The idea is based on the fact that when we wake up during REM-sleep (the dreaming phase of the sleep cycle), we feel much more alert. If we wake up during deep sleep, grogginess will naturally follow. So the way to go about this problem is to set TWO alarm clocks (preferably a radio alarm if you have one). The first one should be set just a few minutes before your normal waking time. The volume on this one should be set to such a volume that you wouldn’t wake up during deep sleep, but you would during shallow (i.e. REM) sleep. The second alarm should be set at the latest possible time that you could wake up (without being late for school, work etc.). The volume on the second alarm should be set very high, to ensure that you wake up no matter what.

By using this method, you’re giving yourself an honest chance to wake up during REM-sleep, thus increasing the probability of waking up feeling refreshed.

The purpose of this blog

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Hi there, thanks for visiting my site. The purpose of this blog is to share solutions to various sleeping problems. I've experienced sleeping problems on and off for years now, and I’ve encountered almost every conceivable sleeping disorder (sleep apnea being the big exception). Sometimes I recover quickly, and other times the problems persist for weeks.

Given my natural interest in reading, I’ve done a lot of researched on this topic. As I try out different advice I’ve started to realize that most of it doesn’t work very well. What’s most important is to filter through all the junk and get to the actual root cause of your problem.

Unfortunately there are plenty of pessimists out there. People are treating sleep deprivation as a death sentence. If you're having trouble with your sleep, the number one thing to remember is to maintain a good attitude. Giving up should not be an option.

For the time being, this is the best general advice I could give anyone about sleep:

1. Don't expect anything when you go to bed. Just lie in bed like a clueless zombie. Close your eyes and relax.

2. Never attempt some silly "technique" to help you sleep. Counting sheep never helped anyone with a serious sleeping problem. This just makes you more conscious, which is the exact opposite of what you want. Don't try anything in particular. Like I said, just relax and have no expectations whatsoever.

3. Only ever go to bed when you're really tired, and get up at a fixed time every morning.

4. Avoid caffeine and sugar at least 5 hours before bedtime.

5. Read for an hour before going to bed.

6. Exercise early in the day (go for a jog).