what will it take to relax your mind? I think that's the key.

You know what is the worst when being unable to sleep? That when you finally rest, you're oversleeping too much and it messes up when "bedtime" is supposed to be that you can't decide whether to take things you are supposed to before sleeping or not, cause you don't know if it's going to end up being a nap or sleeping for real.

Can't believe no one suggested counting sheep

Have you already bought the Ginsu Steak Knives, the ThighMaster, the Miracle Socks and the HD Vision Wraparound Sunglasses?

Oh! And a snuggie?

Not to derail this thread, but since someone proposed using a homeopathic remedy in this thread, I think a few facts about homeopathy should be presented, and I would encourage the OP to do some of her own investigation before spending a cent on any homeopathic product because you’ll likely be paying for nothing. In my opinion, it’s a pure sham treatment, and there’s no established medical literature that shows homeopathic treatments provide anything more than placebo benefit.

Homeopathy is based on two basic principles:

1) The law of similars: IE you treat a symptom with an ingredient that would tend to provoke that very symptom.

2) You don’t do that.

If that seems a little odd, even ridiculous, then welcome to the upside down, logically tortured world of homeopathy. In a homeopathic treatment, a sleeping aid might contain caffeine because homeopaths believe that a disorder can be treated by dosages of a substance that provoke those same symptoms. However, they also believe that the dosage has to be small – extremely small, and that’s where things leave the boundaries of reality and enter truly magical belief systems.

Homeopaths dilute (in water usually, though apparently they may use alcohol) their solutions repeatedly to the extent that there is generally no chance of any trace amount of the active ingredient left. The ‘Rescue Sleep’ product recommended in this thread apparently has a ‘5X’ dilution. I wasn’t able to find the concentration on the product's website, but I did find the dilution here: http://well.ca/products/b...13744.html. This means that the original substance has been diluted 1/10 * 1/10 * 1/10 * 1/10 * 1/10 times, and should be in the product at a concentration of 1 part in 100,000.

That’s not much – but it’s actually quite a bit in comparison to many homeopathic remedies, which often dilute their product to such an extent that there’s almost zero chance that there’s a trace molecule of the original solution left. For example:

http://www.quackwatch.com...homeo.html

There are many excellent sites that expose homeopathy as what it is: a sham treatment based on magical beliefs. I like the write-up done on it at quackwatch, which I linked to above but there are tons of other resources that point it out. The Wikipedia page gives a good summary of homepathic claims. If anyone has some time to kill I’d recommend going through some of the youtube videos posted by homeopaths and letting them explain what they believe in their own words. I’m at work right now and can’t link to any of them, but a lot of them are pretty entertaining in an ‘I’m listening to a delusional, perhaps borderline insane person’ sort of way.

As for the specific product mentioned:

http://www.sleep-aids.com...bach-safe/

http://www.livestrong.com...ep-remedy/

[Edited 2/18/12 6:52am]

Whatever you do, don't go to him for advice

[img:$uid]http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQAapuhJ66PQeCk2gKHTrSzaPzhU1yC8Wb_8OGZl6Sh94P-pvVd[/img:$uid]

non alchohol beer with yeast extract makes me sleepy but with a book also.

I haven't completely solved this midlife insomnia thing. It's a tough one. It's rare that I get more than 6 hours sleep a night and a drawn out sleep defizit can throw me head first into a depression.

Good luck with that Erin.

Better fix that, Erin...

http://www.thesudburystar...?e=3476536

Don't work out late. That will make it harder to go to sleep.

I had trouble falling asleep for years. As soon as I turned off the lights my mind would go into overdrive. I tried all kinds of remedies and diets and mental exercises but not nothing worked...until a few months ago. I finally found something that works nearly every single time: Sudoku. Seriously! I enjoy solving it but it also makes me sleepy every time, especially if it's challenging enough. After 20 min to half an hour I'm almost dropping the pen, at which point I turn off the lights and fall asleep within minutes. Try it!

damosuzuki said:

I´m VERY skeptical when it come to homeopathic remedies but whether you want to believe in them or not is of course totally up to you. I USED to believe in them but stopped doing so years ago. But if it helps other orgers, you might want to give it a try.

I suffered and sometimes still suffer from insomnia but these days I´m doing much better than a few years ago. Emotional stress, worries and drastic changes can lead to insomnia. And an unstable sex life or a rollercoaster relationship can worsen insomnia, no matter how much you try to make up for it by doing whatever you do, whether it´s watching porn, masturbation etc. When your mind is already exhausted thinking about your frustrations then doing that can of course also increase your frustrations and therefore your insomnia.

Working out is usually a great remedy but maybe you´ve overdone it. I read your post in the fitness thread and I remember that you sometimes workout up to 6 times a week. While that is really admirable and not necessarily too much, it could also mean that you´re in a state of overtraining, a problem that is usually a male problem because it´s more often men rather than women who overtrain.

Like RodeoSchro said, working out late in the evening can disturb your sleep patterns ( I sleep like a baby when I work out in the late evenings but I know that it CAN mess with most people´s sleep to work out late).

If you work out late, maybe you should try going to the steam room or dry sauna if your gym has those facilities. If not, try going to the sauna, preferrably steam room, or to a public swimming pool a few times a week, like one or two times, and see if it helps. But you have to go straight to bed afterwards and not wait too long.

I know it always helped me a lot during my worst phases of insomnia.

The overtraining thing is easy to overcome....just rest a bit more and try not to workout too often for a while and see how it works out for you. Exercise IS very good but if you overdo it, you often get the exaxt opposite of the benefits, like insomnia, increased cortisol and adrenaline levels and so forth.

Also be careful with alcohol....it might help at first and in very small quantities but it´s a double edged sword for multiple reasons.

I don´t use any prescription pills because that kind of sleep is not really satisfying but if it helps you to fall asleep, you may want to give them a try just so you can learn how to sleep again. But they did nothing for me, just made me feel drowsy and even though I took more than I was supposed to later on, they still didn´t help me fall asleep.

Do you suffer from tinnitus or is there too much noise in your bedroom or your area?

Try a white noise player, it helps me relax a lot. Especially the chirping crickets sound relaxes me within a few minutes, much better than meditation for me.

http://whitenoiseplayer.com/

Genesia said:

JerseyKRS said:

melatonin works for me at high dosages....10-15mg.

I'm taking ambien every night for the past few weeks. It def. helps, but even with it I've had nights where it takes me hours to get to sleep.

[Edited 2/17/12 21:10pm]

Ambien can definitely backfire. I try not to take it more than two nights in a row.

I took Ambian for a bout a year. It made me feel like a crazed lunatic! It has a very strong affect on your mood during the day. I've known other people who took that stuff and it drastically changed their personalities. I will never go near that stuff ever again!!!!

RodeoSchro said:

Don't work out late. That will make it harder to go to sleep.

Right. Someone suggested to me that working out in the evening would make me tired, therefore, help me sleep. WRONG! If I workout after work, I go to sleep but wake up at 1a in the morning. It's like clockwork! It never fails! the thing I learned about that is in order to go to sleep and stay asleep your body has to be at a certain temperature. After a workout, it takes the body several hours to cool down and get back to a normal temperature. If you go to bed with your body temperature too high, either you won't go to sleep or if you do, it won't be for long. Working out at night does work for some people. For others, it is an insomnia nightmare!

I know that feeling, when your mind races and you feel unsatisfied because of things that didn't work out well, things you didn't finish, things you would like to have said/done earlier etc.

I hate medicine, that's why I've come up with something else that helps me. Maybe it will help you too:

- I take a long, hot shower, use the best bath products I have, use the best body lotion and concentrate on the smell. It helps me to relax.

- I drink one glass of warm milk with honey in it. And I drink it slowly. The amino acids in warm milk will help relax your mind. (a warm banana milk-shake helps too)

- While I sit at the kitchen table, alone, and drink slowly, I relax and think about the day. I think about what I have achieved and what I will achieve tomorrow. Keeps the lights dim and avoid noise.

- I listen to music and think about the music (how it was recorded, how it was written etc. basically, I just break the whole thing down so that, in the end, I feel like I understand. I find this feeling very helpful when I try to relax my mind). You can take anything you like - a short piece of poetry, a cooking recipe, whatever. Just break it down in your mind and witness how you gain control over a situation and your logical thoughts.

- I open the window for at least seven minutes, so that it is quite cold in my room. I stand by the window and breathe slowly. I try to enjoy the smell of fresh air. This way, I somehow force myself to remember how beautiful the little imperfections of our world are. Being thankful for what I have makes it a lot easier to worry less.

- In bed, I think about what I want to do tomorrow again, reassuring myself that my earlier process of thought was correct and well-planned.

This might sound a bit like some pseudo-esotheric mumbo-jumbo, but it's basically about forcing your body and mind to relax and feel well and safe. That usually helps me and I hope this might help you too, in some way or another.

JustErin said:

Believe me, I am trying to meditate and stuff but my mind doesn't slow down long enough.

Oddly enough, I can make it through the day ok.

It's tough to start meditating cold turkey sometimes. Try some guided meditation/relaxation for starters.

babynoz said:

JustErin said:

Believe me, I am trying to meditate and stuff but my mind doesn't slow down long enough.

Oddly enough, I can make it through the day ok.

It's tough to start meditating cold turkey sometimes. Try some guided meditation/relaxation for starters.

Yeah, one of those techniques that I like is when you focus on relaxing each part of your body. You can do it by yourself, but a recording can keep you focused when your mind wanders.

KoolEaze said:

"SimplySleep PM" is good and natural as well.

damosuzuki said:

Not to derail this thread, but since someone proposed using a homeopathic remedy in this thread, I think a few facts about homeopathy should be presented, and I would encourage the OP to do some of her own investigation before spending a cent on any homeopathic product because you’ll likely be paying for nothing. In my opinion, it’s a pure sham treatment, and there’s no established medical literature that shows homeopathic treatments provide anything more than placebo benefit.

Homeopathy is based on two basic principles:

1) The law of similars: IE you treat a symptom with an ingredient that would tend to provoke that very symptom.

2) You don’t do that.

If that seems a little odd, even ridiculous, then welcome to the upside down, logically tortured world of homeopathy. In a homeopathic treatment, a sleeping aid might contain caffeine because homeopaths believe that a disorder can be treated by dosages of a substance that provoke those same symptoms. However, they also believe that the dosage has to be small – extremely small, and that’s where things leave the boundaries of reality and enter truly magical belief systems.

Homeopaths dilute (in water usually, though apparently they may use alcohol) their solutions repeatedly to the extent that there is generally no chance of any trace amount of the active ingredient left. The ‘Rescue Sleep’ product recommended in this thread apparently has a ‘5X’ dilution. I wasn’t able to find the concentration on the product's website, but I did find the dilution here: http://well.ca/products/b...13744.html. This means that the original substance has been diluted 1/10 * 1/10 * 1/10 * 1/10 * 1/10 times, and should be in the product at a concentration of 1 part in 100,000.

That’s not much – but it’s actually quite a bit in comparison to many homeopathic remedies, which often dilute their product to such an extent that there’s almost zero chance that there’s a trace molecule of the original solution left. For example:

Oscillococcinum

, a 200C product "for the relief of colds and flu-like symptoms," involves "dilutions" that are even more far-fetched. Its "active ingredient" is prepared by incubating small amounts of a freshly killed duck's liver and heart for 40 days. The resultant solution is then filtered, freeze-dried, rehydrated, repeatedly diluted, and impregnated into sugar granules. If a single molecule of the duck's heart or liver were to survive the dilution, its concentration would be 1 in 100²⁰⁰. This huge number, which has 400 zeroes, is vastly greater than the estimated number of molecules in the universe (about one googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes). In its February 17, 1997, issue, U.S. News & World Report noted that only one duck per year is needed to manufacture the product, which had total sales of $20 million in 1996. The magazine dubbed that unlucky bird "the $20-million duck."

http://www.quackwatch.com...homeo.html

There are many excellent sites that expose homeopathy as what it is: a sham treatment based on magical beliefs. I like the write-up done on it at quackwatch, which I linked to above but there are tons of other resources that point it out. The Wikipedia page gives a good summary of homepathic claims. If anyone has some time to kill I’d recommend going through some of the youtube videos posted by homeopaths and letting them explain what they believe in their own words. I’m at work right now and can’t link to any of them, but a lot of them are pretty entertaining in an ‘I’m listening to a delusional, perhaps borderline insane person’ sort of way.

As for the specific product mentioned:

http://www.sleep-aids.com...bach-safe/

http://www.livestrong.com...ep-remedy/

Several medical studies, including a May 2009 systematic review published in the "BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine," have concluded that the Bach remedy products are safe, but that there's no clinical evidence showing them to be more effective than placebos.

[Edited 2/18/12 6:52am]

Not at all.

Apart from benefiting from homeopathy in my childhood, I've spent a fair amount of my time thinking about the right approach to treating health issues (I happen to study pharmacy, so it made me think about and question many, many things) and I have come to a conclusion that the "scientific" approach where everything has to be measurable and sterile, is quite naive. Life is too complex for that. And the body can never be separated from the spirit. Therefore, homeopathy and similar methods are a much more natural choice because they try to consider the whole person, which is what the allopathic medicine doesn't do. It does, however, make you numb and anesthetised in a rather fast and effective way (which is sometimes necessary, sure), while the holistic approach (be it homeopathy or any concept that considers the whole person) is a bit more challenging as it just might (if the person working with you is the "right" one) deal with the cause of the issue. It requires the willingness to work on oneself. True healing is often not easy nor fast. Of course, there are many unqualified people messing with the vulnerable patients, and I do mind that.

However, if one wants to dismiss something just because they can't see it (extremely diluted solutions, for instance) they have the right to do so. I just wanted to share my point of view. I don't necessarily think homeopathy is always the only right way, I just firmly believe in holistic approach (and always prefer natural medicine over synthtetic).

[Edited 2/18/12 13:13pm]

Because of the nature of sleep and of insomnia, I don't actually think it matters whether homeopathic remedies are scientifically sound or not.

If it is a sham but you believe it works, that is good enough to get some sleep. I mean, people have been recommending counting sheep for years!

I don't know the science of homeopathy, but I would certainly try it for insomnia, if not for cancer.

have you tried any of those music cd's designed to promote sleep/delta brainwaves? i prefer sound to chemistry for some things also i'm a fan of those vivation breathwork cds. reviewing your day backwards also helps resolve wahtever happens.

Deadcake said:

Has anyone suggested a white noise machine? Or a radio tuned to static. People fall asleep when I talk

I keep an air purifier going at night, the hum distracts me from the ticks and clacking of my apartment

Deadcake said:

Has anyone suggested a white noise machine? Or a radio tuned to static. People fall asleep when I talk

Deadcake said:

Has anyone suggested a white noise machine?

Absolutely! Not only does white noise help me sleep, but it works wonders for any lack of concentration I might suffer during the day.

There's a free white (and pink and brown) noise generator here. There's also an app for it, at least for iPhone.

Aelis said:

Somebody wake JustErin up!!! She's been sleeping all day