Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Five Things to Hate About Sleeping Pills

By Cindy Locher, CHT

Even those over-the-counter, and "non-addictive" sleeping pills are indeed addictive! Those who take sleeping pills generally do so out of necessity, because they want sleep, not to take pills. But, if your attention is focused on this article for about three minutes, you may find out a few interesting things about sleep and sleeping pills that will hopefully change your life for the better.

1. Sleeping pills are habit forming. No matter what the commercials tell you, repeatedly using a sleeping pill, even an over the counter product, creates a dependency on that product to produce sleep. While it may not have a powerful chemical addictive property, the psychological association can become so strong that it has the same effect. Basically, once your subconscious mind accepts the idea that you need a pill to sleep, it simply will not remember how to fall asleep naturally some other way. But there is good news, your mind can be re-trained to fall asleep naturally.

2. In a word, Puffiness. That wonderful, bloated look your face and body have in the morning after youve used a sleeping pill. This is a tell-tale sign from your body that your usual overnight healing and other bodily processes have been hindered or even prevented by the drug you have taken. Basically, the toxins are not being properly processed out of your body. No wonder you feel like crap the next day!

3. Both prescription and over the counter sleeping medications are designed to slow down brain function. Your brain has a mechanism to slow down naturally, passing from your normal waking brain activity, slowing down until it reaches the slow rhythm of sleep. There are ways to create this slowing down process naturally, but sleeping pills do it by acting on and suppressing other areas of the brain, not just slowing down its rhythm. They create deterioration in the brain cells. For these reasons, sleeping pills are known to cause unwanted side effects, including poor concentration/fatigue, confusion, impaired coordination, memory, judgment, addiction, respiratory depression, and in extreme circumstances, death.

4. Sleeping pills cause respiratory depression (poor oxygen intake from the lungs) because they accentuate the GABA neurotransmitter, which keeps the nerve cells in the lung tissue from firing properly, therefore decreasing proper lung function. This is why an overdose of sleeping pills creates death by asphyxiation. Could this situation have contributed or caused Michael Jackson's death?

5. Because sleeping pills dont address the root cause of insomnia, or retrain the brain to fall asleep naturally, they actually do nothing to cure the condition they are taken for. Which in turn leads to deeper dependency, because you continue to need to apply the band-aid, but you never actually heal. Fortunately, there are ways to re-train the brain how to fall into the rhythm of sleep naturally, which do not create a dependency because it uses the brains natural mechanism for slowing down and creating the deep delta brain rhythms of sleep. Why dont more people try brainwave entrainment to resolve insomnia before taking sleeping pills? Simply because it is not commonly known. Those who do use brainwave entrainment frequently find that they are able to re-train their brains to fall asleep naturally, without any chemicals. - 14130

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