Should You Take Sleeping Pills?

SHOULD YOU TAKE SLEEPING PILLS

One of the most common struggles you deal with when you have insomnia is if you should take sleeping pills or not.

Nobody wants to take sleeping pills, or any medication for that matter if they don’t need to.

The thought of being on sleeping pills for life sucks. 

However, at some point, you start to feel like nothing is working and become desperate for sleep. Then you feel like you have no choice but to take them. Otherwise, you’ll live the rest of your life on hardly any sleep.

I have been there myself. I hate medications, but I felt like I had no choice. I have taken a few types of sleeping pills, but none of them really worked for me.

There are a lot of misconceptions about sleeping pills, and I want to clear things up for you. I wish I had understood what I am going to share with you when I tried to take sleeping pills for my insomnia.

First off, it’s important to understand that there are two things we need to sleep; sleep drive and no hyperarousal levels.

Sleep drive is basically how sleepy you are, and hyperarousal levels are heightened states of alertness from things such as worry, stress, excitement, fear, puzzlement, and more.

Sleep drive is what produces sleep, and hyperarousal masks our sleep drive, which prevents us from sleeping.

Insomnia is rarely a sleep drive issue. It’s our hyperarousal levels masking our sleep drive. It can only be a sleep drive issue if you are napping a lot during the day, which reduces your sleep drive.

When we have insomnia, our hyperarousal levels are increased because our brain is confused.

When we fear sleeplessness and make all these attempts to escape it with supplements, medications, CBD oil, meditation, and everything else, our brain thinks there is a threat we are facing.

Your brain doesn’t know the difference between a perceived and an actual physical threat, like a lion running at you. All it knows is you are fearing something and trying to escape it.

So your brain tries to keep you safe by activating the fight or flight system. This leads to problem-solving to find how to fight or escape it and putting all your focus on the threat until you are safe. 

This means you are stuck with high hyperarousal levels and increasing amounts of anxiety around sleep and bedtime.

Every time you try to escape sleeplessness (with all your supplements, medications, meditation, etc.) and fail (which they always do in the end), this leads to more frustration and fear. Your brain then thinks the threat is bigger than expected and strengthens your fight or flight system even more.

This is how you get stuck in the insomnia cycle.

Our fears start with our thoughts. Our thoughts produce emotions, and our emotions trigger all these actions that we are taking, which triggers the fight or flight system.

It’s like a chain of events.

It starts with thoughts like, this can’t be happening to me. Why is this happening to me? I have to stop this. This lack of sleep isn’t right or normal, and this is horrible.

All of these thoughts produce these fear-based reactions.

I promise I am getting to the sleep medications now, which is why you are here. It’s just so important to understand sleep and what triggers insomnia before I talk about sleep medications.

Ok…

So when you think about sleep medication, they cannot produce the one thing we need for sleep, sleep drive. They don’t increase it or affect it in any way, and nothing external can. This  is why nothing external can make you sleep.

Our sleep is a passive process, and we can’t control it. It just happens naturally. As I mentioned before, hyperarousal levels are what’s getting in the way. 

Medication doesn’t affect your sleep drive, but it can affect your hyperarousal levels. That’s how sleep medications “help” us sleep. 

Side note, we never overcome insomnia when we are on sleeping pills, and this is because you never taught the brain that you are safe and still have those fear-based thoughts. 

They affect our hyperarousal levels by affecting our thoughts in two different ways….Either through sedation or delegation.

The first way is through sedation. 

You can think of it kind of like when you are drunk from alcohol. You have a hard time forming coherent thoughts.

It’s the same with sleep medications. They make us feel sedated, which makes it difficult to form those fear-based thoughts, which leads to lower hyperarousal levels. When your hyperarousal levels are low enough, your natural sleep system works, and you go to sleep.

It’s not the medication making you sleep.

The second way is through delegation.

Basically, what is happening here is you take a sleeping pill, and you think to yourself, that is great because you have something that will make you sleep. 

You feel like you no longer have to worry or think about it anymore. You feel like you don’t have to make yourself sleep because you have something doing it for you.

This means you will feel less worried, stressed, and anxious about sleep, and you’ll have lower hyperarousal levels so that you can sleep again.

This is basically a placebo effect.

If sleeping pills work for you, studies show they only work temporarily, aren’t meant for the long term, and aren’t going after the root cause of your insomnia, so you never really overcome it.

Eventually, you may have something stressful happen in your life, and your hyperarousal levels are up enough that the sleeping pills aren’t working anymore. Now you no longer feel like they work, and that you can still have bad nights even while taking sleeping pills. Once they stop working altogether, you feel like you are back to square one.

Remember, you still have those fear-based thoughts and reactions going on. Your brain still thinks there is a threat out there, and as soon as you have a night that the sleeping pills don’t work for you, you are showing your brain that there is a threat out there still that can show up at any time without warning.

I never recommend that my clients go off sleeping pills unless they want to. Always do it when you feel ready, and make sure you talk to your doctor before going off them.

The best way to overcome insomnia is by going after the root cause of your insomnia which begins with the thoughts and beliefs that are creating the fear-based reactions.

And you do this by teaching your brain that you are safe and that you aren’t trying to escape a threat. This way, your brain takes sleeplessness off its safety radar and eliminates the fight or flight response. You won’t have hyperarousal levels anymore, and then you will no longer get in the way of your sleep system.

You can do this by not fearing being awake. If you wake up in the middle of the night or can’t fall asleep, instead of fearing it, embrace it. You can turn it into a positive experience. 

Yes, I know that being awake when you want to be asleep isn’t a positive experience, but you can’t force yourself back to sleep with fear, stress, and trying to fight it, and this only strengthens your insomnia.

Instead, do something you enjoy. 

Your brain will start to see that, over time, you're not trying to escape sleeplessness and that there isn't a threat out there. Then it will slowly decrease the hyperarousal levels and start moving toward normal sleep again.

So that’s it. I hope that was helpful and made sense.

By the way, another common treatment insomniacs turn to is CBTi (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia). If you are considering CBTi, then I recommend my blog post about it… Should you try CBTi? https://www.katelingates.com/blog/why-i-won-t-use-cbti-with-my-clients