Sleeping Medicine-When You Can’t Even Dream about the American Dream Anymore
You like reading the paper in bed at bed time just before you hit the sack. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Inexplicably, right after you place down the paper and turn off the lights and nuzzle down, sleep never seems to actually touch on you. What could it be? It’s just possible that learning about every single depressing piece of financial news is not the best possible sleeping environment you could think about. All you hear about in the papers these days is how we are experiencing a jobless recovery, how all the jobs look to be going to the men and not the women, how your retirement fund is not likely to be doing well and how you’re unlikely to be able to retire until you are 72 – it just goes on. You know that you are not supposed to think about any of these things that annoy you, because there’s actually nothing much you can do about them. However, they can affect the way you sleep whether or not you think of them. So what you do when you cannot even dream about the American dream any longer? Should you decide a sleeping medicine? Is that what you have to resign yourself to?
Sleep therapists, in reality, notice a strong connection between a major financial crisis and the sleep problems they have patients reporting. When Chrysler and GM were closing plants and dropping brands from their lines left and right, the towns whom those plants were settled in had people coming to their doctors complaining bitterly of sleeplessness. It may be possible to intellectualize and understand most problems; when you know that your paycheck may no longer be a sure thing, it hits you where you live. It’s your luncheon voucher, your pride. It’s the very bad you rest on your head on. Worse still, it is all these things for the people you love too. You just have no reason to prefer to sleep anymore, regardless how much you try to interpret it with logic.
Surprisingly, doctors are of the opinion that sleeping medicine may be absolutely appropriate in these conditions.
Surely, they try to help their patients with non-chemical remedies to start with – relaxing, staying away from viewing the news, yoga – these things can only work up to a point though. Doctors surely recognize when regular advice has not a chance of working. In these circumstances, doctors mostly stand back from prescribing regular over-the-counter medicine like antihistamines. Those just cause people feeling hung over and sleepy all the following days. What they do instead is to prescribe hypnotic medication to try to break a pattern of poor sleep that the patient has been experiencing for weeks. It will take a little discussion with your doctor to decide how long precisely you’re to be on this sleeping medicine.
Some of the newest sleeping medicine, products like nonbenzodiazepine are great in the way they don’t addict you. When you feel that your sleeping problems are under control, you can stop taking them, and you’ll be none the worse for it. Occasionally, when you are concerned about your financial situation, an antidepressant may work a lot better.
