Dangers of Sleep Aides

I believe we’ve become a quick fix society, haven’t we?

We want quick answers and solutions to just about every single problem we have. We rarely actually want to do any work to make the change. We’re just often looking for the fastest, easiest way.

Oh, you’ve got high blood pressure, okay. Well, why bother trying to lose any weight to fix this when we can just go on a medication? Same thing with high cholesterol. Let’s just get you on some meds. Depression, sure. We can try to fix that too, let’s get you on some antidepressants. You can’t sleep? All righty. Here you go. Hand over some prescriptions for the local new kid on the block, Ambien, so that you can sleep better.

We don’t really like to do too much work. This shows in the stats when you see that Americans spend an estimated 67 billion on sleep aids and remedies in 2020. That’s just in America, but when you look globally, the numbers shoot up to a staggering $90 billion industry in just pharmaceutical sales from sleeping pills and over-the-counter sleep remedies.

Now, for most people, not sleeping well, it’s a lifestyle problem. Not medical. I’m not saying that there aren’t people who have legitimate medical disorders, sleep disorders, but for the majority of the population it’s a lifestyle problem. Yet, people tend to treat it like it’s a medical condition and they take a pill. We expect, as if by magic, to wrestle sleep into submission.

Which reminds me of a great quote from Arianna Huffington - “This sells us a solution to our problem, but it doesn’t actually solve anything. It doesn’t go to the root of why this is occurring in the first place, it’s just a mask. All it’s going to do is disguise the root causes, and all it’s going to do is prolong the problem. This is no accident people. No accident at all.”

The pharmaceutical industry pours millions of dollars into their marketing campaigns. They basically want you to stay hooked on sleeping pills. They don’t really want you to solve your problem, because then you’re going to stop taking their medicine and you’re going to stop paying for it. Just look around. All the ads that promote this idea that, hey, if you’re not sleeping well, we’ll just give you something for that. Wake up feeling more energized, wake up feeling refreshed.

BUT… Are we really even sleeping? What are sleeping pills actually doing? Well, they’re putting us in a fog. That’s true. What else are they doing?

Well, sleeping pills target only one of the chemical systems that’s used in our normal sleep process.

Really, necessarily it has to produce an imbalance in the chemical signals. We know that the artificial imbalance that it creates limits both REM sleep and slow wave sleep. You’re going to see a dramatic decrease in the amount of REM that you go into, and also deep stage three and four. Patients, subjects, or people will spend more time in stage one and two sleep. Most people complain that they don’t sleep well if they’re spending more time in stage one and two.

However, when you are on sleeping pill, this drug clouds your memory and your thinking. You may, in fact, have several wake ups in the night, but it’s unlikely that you’re going to remember them. This tricks you into thinking that you slept well, when really, you haven’t. A 2015 consumer report found that people taking Ambien and Lunesta went to sleep about 20 minutes faster than if they took a placebo, but it only added an extra 3 to 34 minutes to their total sleep time. Three minutes more of sleep. That just seems like such a low payoff for such high costs. Again, I think it has more to do with that skewed interpretation of how we spent our night.

So what are the side effects to sleep aides?

Lots of people complain of hangover-like symptoms when they take sleeping pills. Headaches. Grogginess, nausea. They also complain of having trouble focusing during the day, their concentration and memory is also impaired, which is a common complaint.

But it’s so much scarier than that….

The time spent asleep, especially deep, slow wave sleep, and REM sleep play a crucial role in our memory consolidation. There is an interesting study out of St. Luke’s Hospital in their sleep medicine and research center that tested the impact of sleeping pills, particularly on memory consolidation. They tested the effects on memory in two different sleep medications. Ambien and Sonata. Which are both considered sleep hypnotics. They took 22 adults who had no other previous sleep issues or disorders. They put a third of those people and gave them a dose right at bedtime, recommended dose at bedtime, then another third they took a smaller dose and gave it to the people halfway through the night. The other third they just gave a straight placebo at the beginning of the night. Before and after sleep, they were given tests to rate their memory through word pair association tests, which is our declarative memory.

That’s the form of memory that allows us to store facts, and events, and have thoughts and ideas. They also tested our memory for procedural memory. That’s the rope memory of just brushing your teeth, tying your shoes. You don’t have to think about it, but your body just knows how to do these things. They did tests on both of these areas. The tests revealed that both types of memory were impacted if the sleeping pills were given at bedtime. People perform worse on both kinds of tests. Interestingly though, the researchers found that there was no difference between the placebo and the middle of the night dose. That led to some very interesting questions. The results indicate a reduction in memory performance when taking the sleeping pills at bedtime, which raises questions, like well, does dose size impact memory? Does the timing in which you take it impact your memory? If so, why? So much more needs to be learned about how sleeping pills are affecting our memory consolidation.

Not only does it have these sorts of effects on people, it also leads to addiction. Prolonged use of sleeping pills increases people’s tolerance level for them, so then they need to take more, and more, and more to get the same effect. Quitting these things is not easy. There is both a psychological addiction to the sleeping medication, and also a physical addiction. Stopping suddenly from these types of medication will cause withdrawal symptoms. May even cause rebound insomnia. Have you ever taken Tylenol and Advil for a few days in a row when you have been experiencing headaches, and then you stop taking it, you get something called a rebound headache. You just get a headache because you’re not taking the Advil anymore. It’s similar when you’re talking about sleeping pills that you can get a little bounce back of insomnia.

These withdrawal symptoms can last anywhere from 7 to 14 days. What they can do is cause so much anxiety that the person doubts their own ability to sleep well, and they’ll often return to the sleeping pills.

Then there are Benzodiazepines, which is the drug Xanax, which is actually in antianxiety medications. A study out of the University of Montréal discovered that the use of benzodiazepines when they gave it to people with anxiety, it also improved their sleep, but if you’re on benzodiazepines for 3 to 6 months, there is an increase in the risk of Alzheimer’s by 32 percent. This number jumps to an alarming 84 percent if the medication is taken for more than six months on a regular basis. That’s some scary stuff right there.

And over-the-counter medications, they’re not getting off light here either. The active ingredient in the over the counter sleep aids that you’ll find in things like ZzzQuil is diphenhydramine. Diphenhydramine is the active ingredient in things like ZzzQuil. Now, this actually was used initially to fight allergies, but they discovered that a common side effect was serious or severe drowsiness. They started to implement it as a sleep aid. This can increase the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s. This is according to a 2015 study from the University of Washington. 41 percent of people taking over-the-counter sleep aids for a year or longer had a 41 percent increase in dementia and Alzheimer’s. That’s just staggering.

Let’s keep adding to the pile here. Not only does it do all this, Ambien also does something very, very strange and alarming. It creates this limbo sleep where the person is not fully awake, but they’re not fully asleep either. Which can lead to some really dangerous side effects. People on Ambien describe doing things like sleep eating. Common for people to get up in the middle of the night and eat the entire contents of their fridge, and they tend to eat really weird things, like popular reports are that they ate the whole brick of butter out of their fridge.

There was even people who reported eating cigarette butts, or dipping butter in sugar and eating that. Really weird sleep eating going on. Sleep driving. There’s been sad cases where people have run people over, killing them, or hurting them severely while they were doing this. Some people do sleep texting, sleep phoning, sleep sex, sleep shopping.

This isn’t being ignored. There’s been some mild changes made to try to curb some of these side effects. In May 2014, there was a decision by the FDA, a mandatory decision that you had to cut the start dose. The recommended start dose for most people was much higher than it needed to be, so they cut that start dose down. To put stronger warning labels on the packaging. Now, this is a direct quote from a package of Ambien -
”After taking Ambien, you may get up out of bed while not being fully awake, and do activities that you do not know you are doing. The next morning, you may not remember that you did anything during the night. Reported activities include driving a car, making and eating food, talking on the phone, having sex with people, and sleepwalking.”

If I was holding a medication in my hand that had that warning label on it, I am pretty positive that I would not put that in my mouth. Yet, again, it’s one of the highest selling sleep aids on the market.

Finally, there is the melatonin craze. That’s been going on now for about the last 10-15 years. Now, I think why it gets so much popularity from people is because we think it’s safe, because it’s natural. Or you can buy it in the health food store, you can buy it in the vitamin section at the grocery store. It’s noted as a natural sleep aid, and it’s sold over-the-counter.

Now, the problem with that though is that it’s not regulated at all by the food and drug administration, so there’s no assurance of its purity, and there’s also very little scientific research that’s gone into it. It didn’t have to be, because it wasn’t looking for any food and drug administration approval. There really doesn’t have to be studies that support that it’s safe or effective. There’s nothing hard and fast, which is unfortunate. I think we are soon to see more and more come to light. In animals, synthetic melatonin has been shown to decrease the sex hormone production, and can possibly interfere with blood flow. It could constrict the coronary arteries, and it shouldn’t be taken by anyone who has heart issues. There’s even some evidence to suggest that it increases the severity of depression in anyone who already has it.

Now, there’s also really loose evidence to suggest that it helps treat insomnia at all. In a 1997 study by the consumer report, only half of the insomniacs who tried it reported any improvement to the quality of their sleep, or the duration. It seems like it’s most helpful in aiding people fall asleep more quickly, but it doesn’t really keep them asleep through the whole night. Melatonin is meant to reset the body’s internal clock.

Sleep Aides are not evil unto themselves, it’s just that people abuse them. Or mismanage them in ways. Sometimes it can be helpful too to break a vicious cycle of poor sleep. For example, it’s appropriate to use the supplement to counter the effects of jet lag, or help someone sleep if they have an unusual work schedule, or are suffering from a circadian rhythm disorder.

But what it all boils down to is this… Sleep Aides should not be used for general insomnia. Our bodies are designed to sleep well, sometimes we just don’t know how to make our systems work the way they are intended to! This is why hiring a sleep consultant can often be INVALUABLE! Don’t take the risk of using sleep aides indefinitely! Let’s solve your sleep struggles for good!