Inability to sleep at night can be managed

Taking sleeping pills bought over the counter or from a doctor on prescription and other anti-anxiety drugs will make you develop an unhealthy dependency on the drugs, and make you feel woozy and tired during the day.

Taking sleeping pills are almost never the answer to insomnia. If you must take them, make sure they are taken only temporarily and are a stop-gap measure. The best thing to do is to find out what is causing your sleepless nights.

Other commonsense causes of insomnia

The causes of our insomnia are usually sitting right in front of us, in plain view. Here are some of the most common culprits.

Caffeine is, without a doubt, the number one cause of insomnia, especially with those of you who can’t resist an afternoon cappuccino. You may not realise that many soft drinks have caffeine in them. These include many energy drinks. Most soft drinks are loaded with caffeine. Try holding off on the caffeine after noon for a few weeks, and see what happens.

Again, if you find that you are one of the people who are affected by the caffeine in soft drinks, don’t take them after 4pm.

Some people cannot even take decaffeinated coffee in the morning without having sleepless nights! I am one of those. After keeping off both coffee and tea for some time, I tried taking decaffeinated coffee with coffee mate. I couldn’t resist the creamy taste. I found I couldn’t sleep. Once I left the coffee, I slept better. I now drink only herbal teas.

Diet and ‘energy’ pills and supplements often contain caffeine, ephedra, amino acids and other stimulants that can keep you awake at night.

Too much alcohol is another problem. A glass of wine with dinner can be relaxing, but too much alcohol will keep you tossing and turning. You may fall asleep but wake up after a few hours and be unable to sleep again.

Sedentary lifestyle could also impact your sleep. Couch potatoes often find themselves clutching the remote into the wee hours. Exercise is one of the best sleep remedies I know of. A brisk 20-minute walk or any type of enjoyable exercise (preferably outdoors) some time before 9 p.m. can be just the ticket. Exercise is also a good remedy for stress-induced tension, which can leave you lying awake worrying instead of sleeping.

An enlarged prostate. Older men with benign prostate hypertrophy who have to get up many times during the night can often get relief with a saw palmetto supplement combined with zinc and selenium (follow directions on the container). This can be followed by Magnesium capsules, not the tablets 400mg-500mg. If that doesn’t do the job, try a pea-sized dab of progesterone cream every day (sing a progesterone cream that contains 450 to 500 mg of progesterone per ounce). Some studies indicate that most men over the age of 65 can benefit from a little bit of progesterone cream.

What about melatonin?

Melatonin is a hormone secreted by the pineal gland in the brain in response to darkness. Its message to the body is, ‘time for sleep.’ As we age, we produce less and less melatonin, and this may be a primary cause of the sleep problems so common among older people.

Sleep in complete darkness to enhance your production of melatonin. Get curtains that will completely block out the street and other neighbourhood lights. Also, get masking tape to cover night lights on electrical gadgets in your room or get the electrician to remove the lights.

If you’re past middle age and you have incorporated these commonsense sleep aids and you are still not getting enough sleep, you can try taking a melatonin supplement (an over-the-counter supplement) an hour before bed. You don’t need much melatonin to have an effect – anywhere from 0.25 to 5 mg is good enough. If melatonin deficiency is your problem, you may sleep better the first night you take it. Please, do not take melatonin supplements if you are a healthy and middle-aged or younger person!

A week of body cleansing/regeneration

Most of the time, the body accumulates a lot of toxins from our eating habits such as ‘swallow’ or food that are incompatible such as lactose (90 per cent of Africans are lactose intolerant); or food containing heavy metals such as large fish and stock fish; and from toxins in the environment. These toxins will lead to nasal and sinus congestions which will cause difficulty in breathing while sleeping and hence inability to have good sleep.

They will also create an overload on the liver, making the liver to be very stressed during its detoxification process, resulting in the disturbance of sleep around 2am. Spending one week in a medical detox spa like the Mayr Modern Medicine Clinic will help rid the body of such toxins and regenerate the body system, thereby making you to be able to sleep like a baby again.