Having Trouble sleeping?

Sleeping is more important than just for helping you to look your best. If you’re having trouble sleeping you have many options that you can try including sleep aid medication. The benefit of a good night’s rest to your mental health and well-being makes it worth the trouble to research and find ways to help yourself get the sleep you need.

In addition to a beauty pillow to help you minimize the damage of sleeping with a pillow that is not designed to protect your face, you can try natural methods such as yoga and exercise, listening to soothing, lulling sounds, even listening to lullabies (they are not just for babies). Or you can try any of the many sleep aid drugs that are available. Although, you might want to research sleep aid medications to ensure they won’t do more harm than good in the long run.

Set a bedtime and stick to it!

Sometimes you’ll have no control over what time you go to bed. This is life. It’s unpredictable. Things happen. We won’t always go to bed at the same time every night for the rest of our lives. But for those times of predictability, it’s not a bad idea for you to have a bedtime just like your kids. Setting a bedtime and sticking to it is one step in the process of establishing a natural sleep aid regimen. If you are a working adult you probably have a routine of going to bed at a certain hour to make sure you wake up in time to get to work; but some of us have a more flexible schedule because we work for ourselves or we don’t work. Or maybe you’re a working adult who stays up until whenever you feel like it. and just deal with having to go through your day on 5 or 6 hours of sleep, Whatever the case, if you don’t have a set bedtime, set one and do your best to stick to it. And make sure it’s early enough that you can get at least 8 hours of sleep!

Should you take sleep aid medication to help you fall asleep?

Best beauty pillow - photo of tired young woman lying in bed
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There are numerous drug-based sleep aid products available over the counter that are designed to help people fall asleep. But should you be taking sleep aid medication to help you fall asleep? Are products such as ZZZQuill, Benadryl, Sominex and other over-the-counter sleep aid products the best option for helping you resolve your troubles falling asleep and staying asleep?

According to a Consumer Reports article:

Sleeping pills can also cause dependency and even worsen the symptoms of chronic insomnia if taken for long periods. Sleep-walking, memory lapses, and hallucinations are rare, but have been reported with Ambien, as have cases of driving or eating while asleep within a few hours of taking a sleeping pill. Plus, most of these medications have only been tested over short time periods and in highly select patients. So, little is known about their long-term safety and effectiveness, especially in older individuals, those with serious medical conditions, or with less severe sleep problems.

But if you are someone who suffers from insomnia or some other disorder that causes you not to be able to fall asleep or to sleep soundly enough to get adequate sleep every night, these kinds of findings will do little to deter you from using over-the-counter sleep aid medications. All you care about is that you need help falling asleep and/or staying asleep, and you’ll use whatever immediate and affordable remedy exists to help you get the sleep you so desperately need.

But are there better sleep aid options than sleeping pills and other sleep aid drugs?

Who can argue that it is more ideal to be able to fall asleep and stay asleep without having to depend on drugs? According to the article “How to Fall Asleep the Natural Way – Changing your sleep habits is a powerful fix, free of side effects” written by Consumer Reports January 05, 2016, there are things that you can do to help train yourself into a habit for healthy sleeping the way that you have trained yourself into a habit for unhealthy sleeping. Check out the details of the article in full via this link. Below is a summary of methods for falling asleep naturally that were suggested in the Consumer Reports article.

  1. Wake up at the same time every day, including weekends
  2. Get sunlight as early in the day as possible – maybe take a nice walk soon after the sun comes out in the morning
  3. Get some exercise in the morning
  4. If you’re going to consume caffeine, do it earlier in the day rather than later, and don’t drink caffeine within 6 hours of your bedtime
  5. Try to get some sunlight around mid-day. Maybe do a little walking during your lunch hour, or go sit outside in the sun for a few minutes if you can
  6. Don’t take naps
  7. Don’t consume big meals close to your bed-time. Try to have your dinner consumed by 5PM
  8. Turn off your tech gadgets (laptops, cell phones etc) at least 2 hours before bedtime
  9. About an hour or so before your bedtime, begin to wind down your mental clock. Start dimming the lights. Settle down and maybe read a book, listen to soft soothing music, meditate, drink a glass of warm tea or other warm, non-caffeinated beverage
  10. Remove distractions by maybe closing your curtains or putting on a sleep mask, putting in earplugs or turning on a fan or other “white noise” making device
  11. Put away anything that you might turn use for checking the time
  12. Once you have fallen asleep, if you wake up in the middle of the night, try to keep your mind still, your eyes closed, your body in sleeping mode. Keep listening to the white noise. If after 20 minutes you haven’t fallen back asleep, go to another room and try to do something relaxing. Once you start to feel sleepy again, go back to bed. (Source)