Sleeping pills are going to make things worse for you.


Find out more about the Complete Sleep Solution program. 


Episode Transcript:


Have you tried everything from natural to pharmaceutical just to get a good night's rest? Join me, Martha Lewis, certified sleep expert and functional health coach as I unpack what's really keeping you up at night and how to change it. This is the Sleep Detective podcast and I'm going to show you how to sleep well so you can enjoy your life.


Hello. Hello. Happy Monday everyone. I hope you all had a great weekend. My son, who is eight, has been playing basketball and so we started watching some NBA basketball, so we did some of that over the weekend. I went to my usual yoga class on Sundays, which was awesome as always. And now I am back to work for the week ready to work before I go on vacation with my family to San Diego next week. So if at any time you have any questions about anything I'm saying or about your sleep, please feel free to type them in the comments and I am happy to answer them.


But today I want to talk about how to get off sleeping pills and still be able to sleep. Well. About half of my clients are on sleep medication and they don't want to be, but they haven't really had another choice because whenever they try and get off them, they don't sleep. So this is one of the things that we help with and really the key is to find and fix the imbalances in your body that are affecting your sleep first and then gradually wean off sleeping pills when you're going to be in a place where you can likely sleep without them. So if you try and get off them without actually fixing the imbalances in your body, then you're still not going to be able to sleep. Nothing will have changed. So instead of dealing with that, let's get your body back in balance. Then you'll be able to sleep naturally without needing a medication.


And the reason this is important is because sleep pills aren't really helping. They actually can make things worse for you. I mean they really aren't good for us. We know there are tons of side effects, there are long-term health effects. There's a reason why it taking sleeping pills long-term can lead to dementia and Alzheimer's and things like that because they don't produce natural sleep. They're sedating you, but they change the amount of time that we spend in the different sleep stages. So then the processes and repair that are supposed to happen during those sleep stages don't happen. And that's why they have so many long-term health effects. They can also be addictive. They are toxic and again, they don't give you real sleep. And so if you can't sleep, your body already probably isn't making the feel-good chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, gaba, and melatonin like it should.


So sleeping pills are messing up your brain chemistry and making it even harder for your body to make those chemicals. Now, medication for sleep does have its place for sure during jet lag or acute stressful times. Sometimes you need to get some sleep and it makes sense, but they aren't meant to be used long-term. Every single sleep medication out there says not to use them, and yet doctors prescribe them to people for years and years and years. And part of the reason is, I mean doctors spend over 40,000 hours of training, but they spend zero maybe up to three hours learning about sleep in medical school. Same with nutrition by the way, right? They are learning how to diagnose disease and then prescribe a drug to treat that disease, usually really to treat the symptoms so they don't really know much about sleep. So when patients come to them complaining about sleep issues, they prescribe a pill.


And the problem is this, is that they're using a medical solution for what usually isn't a medical problem, it's a health problem. It's a sign that your body is out of balance. And again, sleeping pills might actually help in the short term. They can help you fall asleep faster by 15 minutes on average, and they increase total sleep time by only three to 30 minutes according to studies. So they aren't even necessarily helping you get that much more sleep. And what happens is that they actually sedate you so you don't experience natural sleep. They produce an imbalance in chemical signals, which decreases the time you spend in REM and deep sleep. And you've probably experienced the side effects like brain fog, difficulty waking up in the morning, can even lead to high blood pressure, memory loss, and strange unexplained behavior. And they can be addictive a lot of times you need to take more and more for them to work and when you stop taking them, you can experience withdrawal and rebound insomnia, which makes it really hard to quit.


Plus, there's a psychological addiction to them as well where it's impossible to tell how much they're actually helping you sleep and how much your brain is relaxing and letting you sleep because you've taken a pill. So those get really confused when you've been taking them long-term and they can be a little scary because they can mask other conditions such as anxiety, depression, asthma, ulcers, chronic pain, heart problems, diabetes and dementia. And they can be dangerous, especially for people with sleep apnea. So one study found that people with sleep apnea who normally have two to eight apnea a night or they stop breathing two to 18 times a night, they have 100 apneas a night when they take a sleeping pill. Now, there are different kinds of sleeping pills. Technically there are some supplements that promise good sleep like herbs, CBD, melatonin, they usually don't work by themselves unless you're also addressing the imbalances in your body.


So many of my clients have tried all of those things and they aren't enough to help because melatonin isn't going to help by itself if you also have a parasite and hormone imbalance and all of these other things that can affect sleep. There are also over the counter sleep aids, which are really antihistamines that help with sleep because they have the side effect of causing drowsiness, but they can also cause clumsiness, dizziness, dry mouth and throat and blurred vision. And then there are two classes of prescription sleeping pills. So there are benzodiazepines, and I have done an entire podcast episode on this warning people about benzos as we call them for short. I have worked with quite a few clients who have had such a hard time getting off them or they experience long-term side effects after getting off them. And these things are highly addictive and tolerance builds up really quickly and they're most commonly used for anxiety.


They can include things, the drugs, Valium, Librium, Ativan, and Xanax. And the side effects can actually be increased anxiety, agitation and memory dysfunction, and they won't work for more than three weeks than three weeks. Yet people are prescribed these for years. And so if you haven't started taking them and you've been prescribed them, I warn you to do whatever you can not to take them, especially not more than three weeks. Then there are also hypnotics. So these are a new class of drugs that work on the GABA receptors in the brain that control alertness. So things like Ambien, Lunesta, and Sonata and zolpidem is the active ingredient in these and it helps knock you out, but it won't help you stay asleep. So these sleep aids are marked as being safer and less addictive than benzos, but they are still many different side effects. And I want to add these prescription medications.


And even over the counter antihistamines, they put this huge burden on your liver. So a lot of clients will tell me, I don't know why I have liver issues. I don't drink alcohol or I haven't in a long time or whatever it is. And there are other ways to get toxins. I mean pathogens in your gut can contribute to toxins, things you're exposed to, heavy metals, pesticides, things like that. But also drugs, prescription drugs put a huge burden on your liver and your body in general to process them and get them out of the body. So another reason why we want to avoid sleeping pills. So what is the solution? I already told you you aren't sleeping because your body isn't healthy. And sleeping pills unfortunately just get your body more out of whack, more unhealthy. They're really a bandaid that is masking the symptom.


They aren't actually getting to the root of the problem. So to get off sleeping pills, you need to address why you can't sleep in the first place and work on fixing that. So that's what I do in my programs with the functional lab testing is we find, okay, what is going on in your body that is keeping you from being able to sleep normally? Then we start addressing those things and I recommend supplements, sometimes dietary changes, some stress management techniques. And then once you're sleeping better, after having made those changes and getting your body more back in balance, then I help you wean off sleeping pills with your doctor's approval of course. And so I recommend a very slow gradual, it can take a few months to get off sleeping pills because doing it so gradually, but that way it's easier psychologically and it's going to prevent the rebound insomnia that can happen from trying to get off sleep meds too quickly.


And so every client I've worked with, their doctor has always approved of my plan because it's such a gradual wean down like way more gradual than they would even recommend. And so if you want to sleep naturally without the side effects of pills, then you want to book a call with me and find out about my programs, especially the Complete Sleep Solution Program. So that is a six month private program where you work directly with a sleep detective coach, do the functional lab test to find the root cause of why you aren't sleeping. You get a customized plan to correct those imbalances in your body. We'll also give you a customized wean down plan at the right time when it's time to wean off the sleep medication. And you have support for six months from your coach. So you have 12 sessions over six months to help you implement your plan and to work on any of the mental part of not sleeping that you might have any kind of anxiety about sleep, any kind of stress in your life that can be affecting your sleep and your health and help with the psychological part of weaning off of sleep meds.


So that is going to be a big part of it as well. So the goal of the program is to help you consistently sleep at least seven hours a night uninterrupted, naturally and permanently. So without medication and permanently, this isn't a short-term fix where I'm going to say, Hey, take these little herbal things and oh, you're going to be sleeping better in a few weeks, but then a few weeks from then you're just going to go back to where you were before. No, we are doing everything to get your body back in balance so you can sleep normally long-term. So it is a permanent solution. And the first step for this is to sign up for a consultation with me. So we'll talk about what's going on with your sleep, what's going on with your health, what you've tried so far, even if you've done lab testing and you've been to other practitioners, I'll talk about why that hasn't helped so far and what's actually going to work.


What's different about this program that is going to help you be able to consistently sleep well. And it's partly because it is a body and mind program to the extent that you need both. So I'm using functional lab testing, but we're also looking at the mental part of not sleeping, which for almost all of our clients, it's a combination of both of those things and we specialize in sleep. Both my co-coach, Claudine and I have both have sleep issues. We know what it's like to not be able to sleep well and how frustrating it is and miserable it can be. And so we totally empathize with you and we are so excited to celebrate with you as you keep getting better and better. Keep you motivated during the tough times, support you during the tough times, help you make the changes that are going to help you get better and then just cheer you on and again, celebrate with you as you keep getting better and better.


So I have put information where you can find out more about the Complete Sleep Solution Program. You are also welcome to message me at any time. I am happy to answer any questions and someone is writing, I wake up at 2:00 AM daily. I don't know why many stress situations. So stress definitely is going to affect our sleep. And so when we think of stress, we think of mental stress, right? But mental stress affects the body over time. So when your body's constantly making cortisol to deal with stress, it takes those resources away from your sex hormones. So from estrogen, progesterone, testosterone for both men and women, this is true and this is important because when those hormones get depleted, it can directly affect our sleep. Stress also damages the gut directly. It damages the lining of the gut, which means our immune system is compromised because 80% of our immune system is in our gut.


We don't absorb nutrients as well from food when our gut is damaged and then we are at higher risk for when we're exposed to pathogens like a parasite or bad bacteria, those are able to take over because our immune system is down and the good bacteria might be depleted, and then those pathogens start damaging the gut as well. When we are stressed, our body also burns through certain minerals faster than others, especially magnesium, sodium, potassium. So then those can get out of whack, which can also lead to sleep issues. So many things happen when we're stressed. And I want to point out too, when your body's in balance and when you're able to deal with stress, well, you can be going through a stressful situation and it doesn't affect your sleep. I know because I've gotten to that point. If something crazy stressful happens, yes, it's going to affect my sleep like it would anyone's, but if things are just a little more stressful than usual, I know how to handle them and it doesn't affect my sleep.


And so it's getting your body to a place where it can handle stress without it affecting your sleep. It's also getting your mind to a place where it can handle stress without it affecting your sleep. And we help you with both of those things in the Complete Sleep Solution Program. So yes, stress is a big part of it, but you can still be stressed and sleep well when everything is in balance. So I hope that that helps with your question there.


All right, everyone, thanks so much for listening. And tomorrow I will be back talking about how my client, Jane slept seven and a half hours straight for the first time in years. So what she was dealing with before she came to us, how she's doing now and how she got there, I want to give you hope and real life examples of how this works because I want you to know you don't have to live with poor sleep forever. And I know up until now you might've thought that there aren't any other options that a sleeping pill or cognitive behavioral therapy are your only options, but there are other options there we can find and fix the imbalances in your body and the stress in your mind that are causing your sleep issues so you can sleep well without drugs for the long-term. So I look forward to talking to you tomorrow as well. Enjoy the rest of your day and I will talk to you soon.

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