Why Sleeping Pills Are Ineffective And Dangerous

by Yan Muckle, SleepTracks.com

Most sleeping and anti-anxiety pills are in the family of benzodiazepines. These drugs depress the activity of your brain and slow brain waves.

But it's a myth to think they make you fall asleep fast. What benzodiazepine does is it clouds your thinking and your memory, which causes you to FORGET that you were awake during the night. Your perception is altered and you end up being convinced that you slept more than you actually did. Want some proof?

After reviewing nine studies that used sleeping pills to treat insomnia, scientists discovered that patients still took 46 minutes on average to fall asleep. Talk about a feat!

Another thing you need to know is that all sleeping pills have what we call a half-life. The popular drug Tranxene, for example, has a half-life of 2 to 4 days. Which means that your body will need up to 4 days to get rid of the drug and you'll suffer from daytime drowsiness and poor performance during that time. Ambien has a lesser half-life of 2-4 hours - but do you really want to feel like crap for the first two to four hours of your day and waste the best part of the morning?

You'll also be happy to hear, if you didn't know already, that these drugs lose all of their effectiveness after a short while. After a maximum of four to six weeks, the brain becomes accustomed to the drug and IT STOPS WORKING ENTIRELY. Yet physicians prescribe sleeping pills for months or even years.

That's despite the fact that sleeping pills have a longer list of nasty side-effects than almost any medication. Pleasant things like hangovers and headaches, whitdrawal symptoms and physical dependence, high blood pressure, anxiety, nausea and more.

They even induce what we call "rebound insomnia" when you try to get off the wagon - we're talking here about temporary insomnia that can last for seven to ten days after you stop the medication, and that can be worse than the one you tried to cure in the first place!

So Why Are Doctors Still Prescribing Sleeping Pills So Liberally?

Unfortunately, almost any doctor to which you'd tell your story would prescribe sleeping pills as a "remedy". Why?

First, they don't have time to teach you what you need to know to get back to healthy sleep. There's no way they can teach you the proper foundations of sound sleep in 10 minutes.

Second, even though insomnia is one of today's most common health problems, they don't even receive one full hour of training about it during their medical education. So even if they had the time, they wouldn't know what to say!

Third, drug companies developed a LOT of tactics and incentives to lure doctors. Prescribing a pill is easy, it's fast, it's available, and physicians received ample information and training about it.

And fourth, even today, the majority of medical doctors are still convinced that drugs are the best/only answer to health problems.

Close This Window

---