Insomnia Medication - 6 Reasons Why Sleeping Pills Never Really Work To Treat Insomnia

If you have trouble falling asleep and/or sleeping through the night, you may pay a visit to your doctor to find out what is going on. Most likely your doctor is going to recommend one thing and one thing only: sleeping pills. And soon you'll find yourself walking into a pharmacy with a prescription.

For your doctor, it's convenient, but for you sleeping medication may not be the best choice for insomnia relief.

If you are thinking about trying sleeping pills or if you are taking them and wondering if they work, consider the following 6 points.

1. Most sleeping pills are merely tranquilizers. All they really do is sedate you (think wild animal shot with a tranquilizer gun, here). They don't really help you fall asleep, they just make you forget that you never really slept.

2. Over years of testing, one famous study at a medical center in Boston discovered that people taking sleeping pills still need an average of 46 minutes to fall asleep.

3. Sleeping pills interfere with normal brain function and even when they do help you fall asleep, they most often cause a light poor-quality sleep.

4. One of the side effects of sleeping pills is hangover-like symptoms the day after you take them.

5. After 4-6 weeks of use, your body becomes tolerant of sleeping pills and they are no longer effective. This leads to increased dosages and stronger medicines.

6. Once you stop taking sleeping pills, you can experience "rebound insomnia" which is often much more severe than the original problem was in the first place.

If you haven't started yet, it's pretty easy to see why you may want to think about it long and hard before swallowing any of these pills.

And if you are already taking them, you may want to your doctor on how to gradually reduce them.