Do Sleeping Pills Help or Hinder?
Your body clock releases a range of sleep-inducing chemicals that helps you put head to pillow. Medication tinkers with this process so comes at a cost.
Any medicine or substance that hastens sleep—be it sleeping tablets or alcohol—actually hampers good sleep. Sleeping aids make you drowsy either by chemically tickling the sleep-inducing part of the brain called the VLPO or muffling the stay-awake impulses from the brain’s RAS region. Drugs (and alcohol, see below) do send you to sleep, but medicated slumber is not the same as the natural kind. In fact, any chemical that makes you sleepier or more awake (including caffeine) cripples the normal rhythm of sleep.
Like alcohol, sleeping pills ...
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