Whenever we have a problem with our sleep – whether it’s for a few nights, a few weeks, or it seems intractable, many of us will reach out to the pharmacy for a solution to the issue.

Sometimes it’s a visit to the doctor for a prescription for sleeping pills, and sometimes it’s as convenient as some over-the-counter treatment like Advil PM or NyQuil.

“My personal experience is with a drug called lorazepam (Ativan). It’s a benzodiazapine that worked (initially) but that took me over a year to wean off. You’re body develops a “dependency” on these kinds of drugs, and you cannot just “stop”. It’s nasty stuff!”

How To Get Better Sleep

Although these pills may work for you, what they’re doing is playing with your natural sleep, and masking the insomnia that will still be there when you stop taking the pills. Often the kind of sleep that you do get is strange – like very little REM or vivid dreaming. I think that taking these once in a while is probably OK, but to rely on them for sleep night after night is a problem.

The secret in “How to get better sleep” is one of two things:

• The insomnia is caused by something else. It could be a medical condition like joint pain or restless leg syndrome or sleep apnea. Or it could be some substance that you take like caffeine or nicotine or alcohol. It could also be a side effect of some medication that you’re on – it could be anything. You (and maybe with the help of your doctor) need to figure this out. Most people find that when this external issue is managed, the insomnia goes away.
• If it isn’t caused by something external, then it must be internal. For sleep issues it’s most often anxiety of some sort, depression, or stress. They’re all hard to measure, and they all originate in your brain. So the only way to handle them long-term is to manage them cognitively - and that means retraining your brain. Naturally.

There’s a lot of information out there on curing your insomnia naturally, and it behooves you to go find as much of it as you can. You should need to swallow anything! Experiment with it. You may find that one thing by itself does nothing, but in combination with others it becomes very powerful.

Start off with basic sleep hygiene, and go from there. Be confident that curing insomnia long-term comes down to just you and your brain, not you and a bottle of pills.

Posted by Doug at BuildBetterSleep.com