Sleeping pills are generally bad news as they will break down your body’s natural sleep cycle and make sleep very difficult in the long term. Studies have shown that the effects of prolonged use of sleep medication have an overall negative effect on the sufferer and concluded that sufferers of insomnia are better off without them.
Sleeping pills can be addictive, like any other drug and whilst you maybe thinking that they are safe, sufferers who use them generally have higher mortality rates. The chemicals in sleep medication are not only addictive, but they also decrease brain cell activity during the day.
Over time your body will build tolerance and dependency to sleep medication and they may become ineffective. Many sufferers increase their dosage because of this, to try and attain the same affect. This severely increases the risk of damage to mental and physical health. 100,000 deaths occur a year in the U.S. alone, due to adverse drug reactions. More than 1000 of these deaths are due to the overdose of sleep medication.
Because most major sleep medication interfere with normal brain wave patterns you may not experience the deeper and restorative stages of sleep at night. As a result you may find that you wake up feeling groggy, drowsy or tired. Other Side effects include urinary retention, blurred vision, dizziness and palpitations.
Another reason to avoid taking sleeping pills is that prolonged use can cause ‘rebound’ insomnia. When you begin to take sleep medication you are no longer relying on your natural ability to sleep. Sleep is a natural process which is supposed to just happen. When we begin to rely on sleeping pills the body and mind increases dependency on them.
In reality sleeping pills are a crude way to fall asleep. Sleep no longer becomes natural, you are essentially being drugged to sleep. As we build dependency it becomes increasingly difficult to stop taking them. If by any chance we are able to wean ourselves off them we get what is called ‘rebound’ insomnia, which is far more difficult to treat.
Although sleep medication may help you to fall asleep, they do not improve daytime functioning whatsoever. In fact people who take sleeping pills often complain of fatigue, lethargy, sleepiness and the inability to concentrate in the day. Sleep medication cannot provide quality restorative sleep, which many people have been misguided to believe. Unfortunately people still rather take them because of the feel-good effect they produce. New users often become dependant on sleeping pills and end up becoming chronic sleeping pill users.
Shockingly in a recent study it was shown that a group of insomniac patients given a placebo, performed better than those given sleeping pills. In a world obsessed with quick-fixes, something must be done to inform sufferers of the consequences and reality of taking sleeping pills.
