The good news is that there are many natural alternatives to prescription drugs in helping with insomnia. The best thing to help with insomnia is to look at your lifestyle. Stress can be a big factor so by trying to limit stress or eliminate it, many issues with insomnia will disappear. Another underlying cause of insomnia is depression. By seeking help or talking with friends, a person may be able to help eliminate their insomnia. If these remedies are not enough, there are several natural things a person can take to help sleep and fight insomnia.

• Melatonin

  Melatonin is a hormone found naturally in the body that helps you sleep. Melatonin is probably the most common natural remedy for insomnia.  Melatonin is typically taken about 30 minutes before the desired bedtime.You can find melatonin in most stores or health food stores.

• Kava

  Kava is an herb that is especially good for anxiety related insomnia. In small doses, kava creates a relaxed and somewhat euphoric feeling in the person ultimately helping them sleep and fight off the insomnia. However, kava can effect the liver is taken in large doses so be careful.

• Valerian Root

  Valerian Root is one of the most commonly used herbs for insomnia. It can work for some and not for others. Like other natural insomnia remedies, you may need to take it consistently for a week or two before receiving its full benefits.

Passion flower, chamomile, and other herbs can also help with insomnia. There are many forms of natural sleeping aids which can be found in the health food store. If your insomnia is persistently bad, it is defiantly advised to see a doctor as there may be other factors contributing besides the insomnia.

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The authors used cardiorespiratory polygraphy to investigate whether 150 patients (110 men and 40 women) with atrial fibrillation suffered from sleep-disordered breathing. To avoid statistical bias, they only included patients with normal systolic left ventricular function. The mean age of the patients was around 65 years.

Breathing during sleep was impaired in 74% of the patients. 43% of the group suffered from obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). This means that the upper respiratory tract is constricted during the night, leading to oxygen deficiency. The authors found that 31% of patients suffered from central sleep apnea (CSA). This type of disorder is characterized by periodic decreases and increases in the respiratory depth and rate. Breathing becomes flatter and flatter, until it is interrupted for an interval.

Awareness of OSA already plays an important role in the primary and secondary prevention of atrial fibrillation. According to the authors, the results indicate that central sleep apnea is also relevant.

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Anderson, a 24-year-old Mays Landing resident, works the later shift at the Office Depot in Mays Landing. The local store is closing, but amidst closeout bargain signs and several empty shelves, Anderson has to keep working to pay his car and utility bills until he’s hired somewhere else.

Six or seven hours of sleep a night is the norm for Anderson. He attributes the lower amount of sleep to working the later shift, but that doesn’t mean he’s ignoring the fact he should be getting more sleep.

“Maybe I’m losing a little bit of sleep,” Anderson said. “There’s more of a chance that I don’t sleep.”

Many Americans aren’t getting enough sleep, and it seems to be due to stress over the troubled economy. That was the verdict from a National Sleep Foundation survey released earlier this month.

According to the annual survey, 27 percent of 1,000 adults surveyed were losing sleep several nights a week due to stress over the economy. The survey also found that 20 percent of people get six hours of sleep or fewer per night, while only 28 percent of people got at least the recommended eight hours of sleep.
Those numbers have increased steadily from 2001, when the survey found only 13 percent of people got six hours or fewer sleep, and 38 percent slept for eight hours or more.

Having difficulty falling or staying asleep, whether it’s for a week or for a lifetime, is referred to as insomnia. Chronic insomnia happens when the inability to fall asleep lasts for more than three weeks. Acute insomnia describes sleeplessness that persists over a couple of days.

There’s a lot of basic causes for sleeplessness – women and people older than 60 seem to be more prone to sleep disorders – but stress, anxiety and depression are among the most common causes of sleep problems, and all of them seem to accompany economic woes.

The problems begin when people can’t tune out from the problems before they go to bed.

“Focusing on worries is the root of sleeplessness,” said Kenneth A. Leight, director of psychology at the Bacharach Institute for Rehabil-itation in Galloway Township.

Think of it like nature’s fight or flight response. Because the mind is focused on something that’s causing a person trouble, that person’s body is keeping them awake, thinking they’ll need to spring into action to fight that anxiety.

Leight performs psychological exams on patients who have difficulty sleeping. After ruling out physical causes such as sleep apnea – a sleeping disorder where a person’s breathing is halted during sleep – Leight can examine what a person can do to have a better night’s sleep.

Sometimes, it’s a matter of changing habits right before bedtime. If your solution to dealing with economic stress is to drink or smoke your problems away, those behaviors can impact the quality of your sleep.

Even though alcohol is a depressant and acts quickly to slow the body down, the body metabolizes alcohol over a couple of hours. After a few hours into deep sleep, the body can be awakened by the byproducts of alcohol reacting in the body.

Alcohol can also suppress rapid eye movement, or REM. That REM cycle is an important part of a person’s circadian rhythm, or biological clock, and removing one essential element of the sleep cycle can mess up the rest of it.

Even those with jobs who feel economically safe and secure can still have a bad night’s sleep. According to Dr. William Bradway, a board certified pulmonologist and sleep medicine specialist with Cape Regional Medical Center in Cape May Court House, shift work plays a large role in disturbing a normal sleep schedule.

Bradway said a person should try to wake up and fall asleep at the same time every day. The routine helps the body to naturally relax itself when bedtime comes. With the kinds of shifts Anderson works at Office Depot, a person can go to bed and wake up at all different times during the week.

Doing homework in bed or lying down to listen to music can cause the body to associate the bed with things other than sleeping, Bradway said. When a person’s head hits the pillow, there shouldn’t be anything left on that person’s mind.

“Do something relaxing,” Bradway said. “Don’t associate your bed with clock watching.”

Changing bedtime behavior to alleviate acute insomnia seems to do the trick. Leight estimated most of his patients are fine after making one or two small changes in their daily habits. However, a prescription drug is sometimes needed.

In 2005, 43 million people filled prescriptions for sleeping pills. Drugs such as Ambien and Lunesta are very popular, but they also carry the risk of addiction. They are Schedule IV controlled substances, meaning they aren’t quite as addictive as narcotics, but they can become addictive.

For people with acute insomnia, Bradway recommended a sleep drug called Rozerem. Studies haven’t linked Rozerem to the same sort of dependency as other drugs.

Once a solution is found to sleep problems, it should be something natural. Sleep isn’t something that happens exactly when you want it to, so ultimately, people need to leave enough time to let themselves enter their own personal slumberland.

“If you’re waiting until just before going to bed to wind down, you’re going to be waiting a long time,” Leight said.

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First, insomniacs are first told to keep a detailed diary of the time they spend in bed asleep and awake. Then, they are told to change their habits, reducing the time they spend in bed each night by the number of hours they would usually spend lying awake.

After a couple of weeks of this sleep “deficit”, many patients discover they are tired enough to start sleeping better.

Read more…

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