Millions of people are taking sleeping pills.
Did you know sleeping pills do not provide natural sleep?
Sleeping pills can damage health, and increase the risk of life threatening diseases.
No past or present sleeping medications on the legal (or illegal) market induce natural sleep.
You may think you are sleeping after taking such aids but this is not natural sleep.
Drugs such as diazepam are a sedative, they sedate rather than assist you into sleep. Most of the current sleeping pills on the market present a similar situation, though some are slightly less heavy in their sedating effects.
Sleeping pills target the same system in the brain that alcohol does, the receptors that stop your brain cells firing, and are thus part of the same general class of drugs: Sedatives.
Another deeply unpleasant feature of sleeping pills is rebound insomnia. When individuals stop taking these medications, they frequently suffer far worse sleep, sometimes even worse than the poor sleep that led them to seek out sleeping pills to begin with.
the majority of prescription sleeping pills are, after all, in a class of physically addictive drugs. Dependency scales with continued use, and withdrawal ensues in abstinence.
The irony is that many individuals experience only a slight increase in "sleep" from these medications, and the benefit is more subjective than objective.
So we now know sleeping pills are of minimum help, but are they harmful?
Natural deep sleep, helps cement new memory traces within the brain, part of which require the active strengthening of connections between synapses that make up a memory circuit.
Sleeping pills may help you fall asleep faster at night, you should expect to wake up with fewer memories of yesterday. This is of special concern considering the average age for those receiving sleep medication prescriptions is decreasing as sleep complaints and incidents of pediatric insomnia increase.
Even more concerning are the effects throughout the body that come with the use of sleeping pills, effects that aren't widely known but should be.
Dr Daniel Kripke, a physician at the University Of California, discovered that individuals using prescription sleep medications are significantly more likely to die and develop cancer than those who do not.
One frequent cause of mortality appears to be higher than normal rates of infection. Natural sleep is one of the most powerful boosters of the immune system, helping ward off infection.
As we know, sleeping pills do NOT induce natural sleep and therefore does not provide the same restorative immune benefits as natural sleep.
Coach HB
This is information was taken from the book Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker
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