Saying NO to sleeping aids
For any health concerns we have, there is always a drug or medication we can turn to alleviate our complains. Even in sleeping, people have depended a lot on medication to aid and induce that perfect sleep to help recharge everyday. After much hyped on using sleeping pills between 1993 and 2010 where a reported jumped of 69% on benzodiazepines and 140% zolpidem prescriptions, research found that there has been 31% less usage of sleeping pills between 2013 and 2018.
"There are several possible reasons for this decline; for example, there's a greater awareness of the potential dangers in the use of these medications, Also, there's been a recent upsurge in behavioral treatments for improving sleep that don't have the potential adverse outcomes that some medications might have" - Christopher Kaufmann, lead research and assistant professor in Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics at University of Florida
For this research, the team studied 0and used data from 29,400 respondents in a U.S. government health survey done every two years. According to the research, the decline of using sleeping pills are due to side effects such as having higher risk of car crashes or that it gives people drowsiness and even memory loss in some senior patients that caused accidents that resulted to injuries such as broken hips.
With this less patronage on sleeping aids, expert such as Dr. Stella Hahn , associate medical director of the Northwell Sleep Disorder Center in New Hyde Park, N.Y. - provided some recommendations on how to naturally induced sleep
- Limit caffeine (including none after 12 noon).
- Remove TV, computers, tablets or phones from the bedroom.
- Keep your bedroom cool and dark.
- Limit your time in bed to sleep.
- Wait until you're sleepy to go to bed.
- And if you have trouble sleeping, even in the middle of the night, get up and do something, like reading until you're drowsy.
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