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Monday, January 25, 2010

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Get Some Sleep, Please!


Get Some Sleep, Please!


Due to Big Pharm’s grip on all our lives, prescription tranquilizers have become an epidemic. Tranquilizer addiction has skyrocketed and it usually comes about by following the doctor’s orders. How do you know when you’ve had enough? There will be a need for more and more pills, obviously, and you could have blackouts when things get too heavy and out of control. You may also have increased sensitivity to them when you drink alcohol. Maybe you also get prescriptions from two or more doctors for the same tranquilizer. It can be a never ending downward spiral.

Preventing this sort of thing can go a long way in stopping the hell that is tranquilizer addiction. When you first get a prescription, question your doctor about it. If the medication is for some sort of physical symptom, question why this is appropriate. If the treatment is for insomnia, question your doctor about alternative methods of diet and exercise that you can try first. I do realize that it is not in the doctor’s best interest to give advice on non-prescription health care, for they are trained early on to treat anything with drugs, but remember it’s YOUR well being that should prevail here.

Don’t exceed the prescribed dosage on a tranquilizer if you find yourself wanting more or not getting the effect you need. Doctor’s aren’t monsters who just want to push pills, they are people too, and most will be cautious, despite their medical school training, to not get you involved with addiction.

Sleep problems can indeed be dealt with, even though for a few rare souls it may seem they have not had a good night’s sleep in ages. Be aware that you are not the only one with these sorts of problems. Most people have some sort of sleep problem and there are many studies and an entire industry that has produced data on these problems.

Occasional insomniacs often add to their own troubles by believing that their difficulty is a serious disorder. If you miss a night or two a month, this is usually due to some other stress or anxiety related to events during the day, in fact, sometimes overworking yourself, mentally or physically, can keep you running long into the night instead of causing you to collapse in bed when you get home.

In order for missing sleep to be considered a chronic problem, it needs to be affecting your ability to operate during the day. Just ask yourself, “If you were getting enough sleep, what would you be able to accomplish differently during the day?” It’s important to listen to your body and get up when it doesn’t want to sleep anymore, it may indeed have gotten enough brain and body rest during a nights sleep and if you demand that you stay in bed too long you’ll confuse your own cycles. The sleep cycle may actually start all over again and you’ll not be able to get up in a little while with a fresh head for the day, simply because you insisted on “sleeping in”.

When I was in college, living in the dorm was tough on my studies, for the bed was right there beside my desk. I literally had to go out on campus and find an empty classroom to do all my study work so that my mind and body would not be confused as to the functions it was to perform in both cases. Your bedroom and bed are for the good night’s sleep you need, and they should be for nothing else - well, you know, not everything... but we’re talking about REAL sleep here.

Keep the telephones and noisy things in other rooms, even the TV and computer if you need to. Keep room temperature around 68 degrees and also make sure your mattress isn’t sagging or moving around on you, and also that your clothes are really your sleeping clothes and not something else. Additionally, check that morning light or street light doesn’t confuse your eyes.

If you find yourself lying awake at night TRYING to go to sleep, this can be a frustrating waste of time. You then train yourself to use the bed to TRY to sleep instead of actually doing the sleep. When it comes morning time, if you haven’t slept well, and two hours after getting up your body wants to fall asleep THEN, you have to get tough. You have to treat it like an unruly child and literally tell your body that it blew it’s chance to sleep and now it has to go to work, and wrestle that feeling to the ground. This can be accentuated with a cup of coffee, I suppose, but caffeine can be a sleep interrupter also. Therefore, if you have to do this sort of thing, make sure it is early in the morning and limit coffee to one cup a day. Trust me, the caffeine build up in your system can become a never ending spiral addiction as well. It’s better that you have NO coffee, or NO caffeine at all, as this is one of those blood acid problems, but I do realize that Starbucks didn’t get rich off of a populace that DOESN’T drink coffee.

Stick to a regular bedtime schedule. Go to bed and get up at the same time each day. Some insomniacs believe they will be able to “catch up” on sleep. This is fantasy. Trying to do this disrupts your biological rhythms. There are also those who say that the body needs to be asleep between the hours of 10pm and 2am in order for the brain to produce certain health benefits which can only be done in the REM sleep that takes place after a few hours of conscious brain inactivity. Don’t quote me on this however, it’s just something I have heard on the fly here and there.

Sleeping pills are a real problem, and most users don’t realize what a huge problem they can become. Doctor prescribed sedatives can be quite useful when there is a current emotional or physical upset that is causing the problem. They can become addictive however, for other qualities they posses. For instance, the relaxing euphoria that they can produce before they actually put one to sleep. Your quality of sleep will actually worsen as you use more and more of them due to the diminishing returns so prevalent in this sort of thing.

If you absolutely need to use pills, you must go into this with the knowledge that your body is going to fight you when you have to stop using them. One should only use them for a week or two, and then stop cold turkey. The following nights will be disturbed, it will happen, but it’s necessary for breaking the cycle that has begun. And it MUST be broken when it is still young. There is no need to relate to you the many celebrities who have been addicted to pain killers and tranquilizers who have either had to do rehab or have died with 10 or more prescriptions in their medicine cabinets. This is not just a celebrity problem, it happens all over the world to people you will never hear about.

Exercise early in the day to help get the blood moving and train your mind and body to be up and active at this time. To exercise at night is to train your body to be active when it should be shutting down. You might not think all this training is all that important, but if you have insomnia or some other sleep disorder, can you afford to ignore the process?

Watch the coffee, tea and soft drink intake during the day, and this includes chocolate and sweet stuff, for it can mix caffeine and sugar in nasty ways inside your bloodstream and wake you up in the middle of the night for something caffeineated or sweet. Those too, are addictions.

Hypnotics, drugs made to get you to sleep and help you stay asleep, stay in your blood stream for a goodly amount of time. After a week of taking a sleeping pill, the accumulation in your blood will be around six times what it was on the first night you took a pill. Be aware of any diminishing hand and eye coordination and also watch the drowsy driving, you may not even be immediately aware that you are driving under the influence.

They can also interfere with other drugs you may be taking, and that can cause unforeseen side effects. Not everyone is the same physiologically, and some drugs effect one person different than another person. The trick is to find the correct combination for your body before all the testing and guessing as to how to give you the best care, does damage or gets you killed, this is simply the way drug prescribing is done. Mass produced drugs cannot take into account the individual needs of every person, therefore, it’s actually better to do all that you can to live without them, for drugs can and do cause death all too many times. This is, of course, against the Hippocratic oath, but it is also a result of our flawed reality.

For some examples, just consider that respiratory problems, impaired liver function and simply old age can be a high risk if you take something along the lines of Dalmane or a type of barbiturate. Barbiturates and something called chloral hydrate both pass through a woman’s placenta and can cause birth defects to unborn children.

Help your doctor out, do everything you can to avoid the need for drugs, and get a good night’s sleep for once.

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