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.