A good night’s sleep is important for your body and mind to renew. When you spend most of the night awake, wishing you could get to sleep, you start the next day sluggish, tired, and perhaps even irritated. Whether you always have trouble sleeping or experience a rare bout of insomnia, drugstore sleep medicines might look attractive to you. Do they effectively deal with sleeping problems, though? Your Mansfield dentists, Dr. Blair Jones and Dr. Seth Harris, discuss the effectiveness of drugstore sleep medicines in this article.
What Are Sleep Medicines?
Sleep medicines are a form of over-the-counter medication specifically targeted towards making you drowsy and putting you to sleep. Sleep medicines are either antihistamines, diphenhydramine and doxylamine, or holistic, like valerian root and melatonin. If you take allergy medication, you are familiar with how antihistamines, like Benadryl, make you drowsy. Holistic remedies might seem strange, but melatonin, available in pill form, is a hormone in your body that helps to regulate your sleep cycle.
Do Sleep Medicines Work?
The short answer about sleep medicines is that they can work. Antihistamines usually help a person feel drowsy and make falling asleep easier. However, they are not proven to ensure sleep throughout the night. Holistic medicines have also been shown to reduce the amount of time required to fall asleep, but selecting the right product is difficult because their potency varies widely.
Sleep medicines can be useful to help you get to sleep on those rare occasions when you just can’t seem to drift off, but they don’t consistently work, long-term. In addition, sleep medicines can have several nasty side effects, ranging from headaches and drowsiness to memory loss.
What Keeps You Up
Using sleep medicine for long periods of time and then stopping their use can cause sleeping problems to worsen. If you have long-term sleeping problems, think about what may cause them. Your Mansfield dentists can help with more than just snoring. Dr. Jones and Dr. Harris treat obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a common sleeping problem that affects over 18 million Americans and a disorder can keep you (and your bed mate) from getting a restful night’s sleep.
Schedule an Appointment with Your Mansfield Dentists
If you suspect that you suffer from obstructive sleep apnea, visit our Mansfield dentist office for a diagnosis and consultation with Dr. Jones or Dr. Harris. Call (817) 259-1357 to make an appointment. We proudly serve patients from Mansfield, South Arlington, Kennedale, Southeast Ft. Worth, Alvarado, Midlothian, and the surrounding neighborhoods.
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