Dangerous ways to try for better sleep....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 5-28-2015

There are effective and safe ways to get to sleep; to stay asleep; and to get restful sleep.

But what if you don’t know them or the ones you have tried so far haven’t worked well enough?

There are antihistamines that make people drowsy.  Alcohol when you are tired can put you to sleep.  And there are the hypnotic sleep drugs.

Should you take them?  Except for alcohol which is a special case, it looks like a very, very bad idea! 

That’s particularly true since there are much safer and effective alternatives

1.  The antihistamines aren’t great on sleep quality and have bad long term effects. 

They are anticholinergic drugs which means they interfere with your normal supply of energy.

And a study found that taking this class of drugs or tranquilizers long term tends to cause mental decline including Alzheimer’s disease. Worse, it’s a strong effect!

2.  The hypnotic sleep drugs are so bad they are scary. 

They have a death rate – sometimes within days of beginning them.  People have done sleep walking under their influence and have eaten poisons instead of food and gone outside in subzero weather for a walk with no clothes on and frozen to death and sleep driven into concrete pillars and the like.

And the hypnotic sleep drugs increase your odds of getting cancer within a year so much they should likely be banned as carcinogenic.  They have a similar huge boosting effect for death from all causes.

And, they don’t result in great sleep quality either; they just stop you from being awake.

Worse, they tend to be addictive.  So when given as a short term help, they can be hard to stop taking.

We have posted on the things that create and restore better sleep and help you to get to sleep and stay asleep.  Some of them are more strategic but there are also things you can take that work instead of those three things. Learn and use those instead!

3.  What about alcohol?

Compared to most alternatives, alcoholic drinks are effective at lowering perceived stress including depression; and when you are short on sleep and you drink them in the evening they do tend to put you to sleep. (So if you are stressed and short on sleep and drink or drink extra do everything you can to not drive or have someone else do it!)

Red wine is by far the safest and most beneficial alcoholic drink.

There are four downsides for using as a sleep aid though:

1.  The sleep alcoholic drinks give you is stress relieving but doesn’t provide the full restorative effects of real sleep. 

2.  Once your body processes the alcohol, you sometimes become wide awake and have trouble falling back to sleep.

3.  Drinking more than a light moderate amount is somewhat fattening and recent research found even harms your heart over time when you drink more than that and heavy drinking can cause brain and liver damage. And, except for red wine, alcoholic drinks are somewhat carcinogenic.

4.  Drinking more than a light moderate amount also causes physically harmful and deadly accidents both driving and at home.

So, if you drink lightly and drink instead of taking the dangerous two kinds of drugs and can sleep a bit longer so your normal sleep is close to what you need, light drinking can help.  And a good quality red wine is usually a better choice if you do this often.