sleep

[V. F. Birling]

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If you've begun to take a sleeping aid, you've just joined one of the largest groups of people using prescription drugs. There are many people suffering from different types of insomnia all over North America and it is of course natural to look for a sleeping aid when you are not getting the sleep that you need. The unfortunate part is that many people are using a sleeping aid that was never designed for them. The pharmaceutical sleeping aid you were prescribed was designed for the short term treatment of a chemical imbalance which is causing anxiety, and therefore causing insomnia. But there are countless people using these sleep aids that do not have a chemical imbalance and have been taking them long term. This, as you could guess, leads to a whole new list of problems. The side effects of a prescription sleeping aid can be hard to handle, especially in the long term. Taking a pharmaceutical sleeping aid for more than a few weeks can easily develop into a dependency where one cannot sleep without using the sleep aid. Finally, your sleep aid may be damaging your body more than you know, mainly the liver and kidneys are affected. For all of these reasons it is best to look to nature for your sleeping aid.

Herbal sleep aids are thankfully becoming more common, though it is troubling how much less frequently they are used than pharmaceutical drugs. Pharmaceutical sleeping pills should be reserved for only the most severe and treatment resistant cases of insomnia, and even then they should only be used on a temporary basis. Most people using them do not meet this criteria, and some of these people have been using prescription drugs for years when a far healthier herbal sleep remedy is available. Not only are herbal sleep aids much easier on the liver and kidneys, but they do not leave the user with a groggy and hung over feeling the next morning. Prescription drugs can have far more serious negative effects than just daytime drowsiness, sometimes they result in full blown hallucination, drastic personality change as well as others. Unfortunately after years of using pharmaceuticals, most patients now require them to get to sleep. Cessation of pharmaceutical drugs for sleep can be extremely difficult, but a herbal sleep aid can make the process much easier.

Who needs to use a sleep aid and exactly what insomnia is, is quite relative to the person. Both age and the individual will determine the amount of sleep that is needed. If a twenty five year old is getting four and a half hours of sleep per night a sleep aid would most likely be recommended whereas if a seventy five year old is getting the same amount of sleep it would be much closer to the normal range. This is why insomnia is defined as a disturbance in regular sleeping patterns and a sleep aid will only be given if it is outside what is normal for that person. Besides taking a sleep aid you can try to exercise during the day (but not right before bed), you can flip the mattress or try to focus on pleasant relaxing thoughts. This does not always work and sometimes anxiety related insomnia has to be treated with a sleep aid. Even in this case a sleep aid with herbs such as St. John's Wort and Valerian Root are much safer than any prescription sleep aid.

herbal sleep aid