Curing Insomnia: What Works and What Doesn't

Having been an insomniac for literally almost all of my life, I recently reached my rope's end and decided that I was going to start sleeping normally or die trying. That may sound like an exaggeration but if you suffer from chronic sleeplessness you know that it often makes you feel like your life isn't even worth living. You know what I'm talking about-nights full of dread and days full of forgetfulness, inexplicable mistakes, mood swings, and generally feeling like you're falling apart.

It seems to me that the worst part of long-term insomnia is the hopelessness it drills into you. I know that as I tried every single remedy and piece of advice known to man, all to no avail, my hopelessness became like a giant, immovable boulder that I thought I would never be able to push away. I've tried everything and nothing works, I thought, so I'll just have to learn to live with this. And when I say I tried everything, I mean EVERYTHING.

Getting out of bed and doing something is the first thing everybody tells you to do. Don't lie there all anxious, thinking about how you're not sleeping. Fine. I'd get up and do something, and continue doing something for hours into the night, until it was so late that even though I would eventually fall asleep, it would only be three hours or so until I had to wake up, tired and stressed yet again.

Booze got me to sleep, but only to wake up a few hours later thirsty and dying to pee. From then on I'd sleep fitfully until the morning, when I'd crawl out of bed haggard, hungover and truly in worse shape than if I'd just stayed awake for most of the night.

Herbal teas made me feel warm and fuzzy inside like a patchouli-smelling hippie, but as a sleep aid they were pretty much a joke. And again there’s that having to pee in the middle of the night.

Valerian, the ancient sleep-aiding herb, worked for about two nights, then I had a near-total tolerance to it. It also smells and tastes like raw dirt and made me feel very anxious.

Over-the-counter drugs like Sominex and Tylenol PM knocked me out in no time, but they put me in such a deep artificially-induced state of sleep that waking up to my alarm the next day felt like coming out of a coma. I'd feel groggy and slightly dumb the whole day, and often get a headache mid-morning. Even worse, if I'd take them before a day off, with no alarm, I'd sleep 10 hours or more and wake up feeling like I'd just risen from the dead, with no idea which way was was up. Besides, acetaminophen, the active ingredient in most of these, can seriously damage your liver, and the last time I checked, I didn’t have a spare liver.

Melatonin may work for some people but I've always found that it stays in my system too long, bringing on sudden bouts of intense drowsiness at random moments of my day when I really need to be awake and aware. This may work as a short-term solution for people with occasional insomnia, but for hard cases like me it just didn't cut it.

Prescription aids like Ambien seem like a godsend at first, and after years of not having insurance the first thing I did when I got a decent health plan was talk a doctor into getting me some of these magic pills. Everyone says that the first time they took Ambien was pretty intense, and my experience was no exception. Let me just say that it felt like falling asleep at 100 mph, and I actually felt alright the next day. "I've found it!" I thought, bounding joyously to the kitchen for breakfast.

As I continued taking them, however, their effectiveness wore off, until I could sometimes take one and not even fall asleep, just stay awake in a bizarre, very intoxicated dreamlike state that made me insensitive and largely unaware of what I was saying and doing. I almost lost a girlfriend once because I was such a douchebag on the phone late one night while in this state-I kept laughing and making inappropriate jokes about the funeral she had just attended! It took me two days to convince her that it had been the Ambien talking, not me.



Still, it may work for you. Remember that occasional insomnia is one thing, and if this is your problem you should perhaps experiment with the treatments listed above, but serious, chronic inability to sleep is something that may need to be attacked from an entirely different angle. I believe I’ve finally found that angle with a new technology called brainwave entrainment, which is essentially ambient music tracks that work with your brain to produce the brainwaves you need for a desired objective, whether it be deep meditation or falling asleep and staying asleep for the entire night.

You can try out some free brainwave entrainment tracks at the Healing Beats site although the quality isn’t the best. The tracks available here are binaural beats, which means you have to listen to them on headphones for them to work. This is obviously a disadvantage as wearing headphones in bed is not terribly comfortable. Also, your only option with these tracks is to play them in a QuickTime window; you can’t actually download these them to your computer. I found the meditation tracks to be quite effective but the sleep one didn’t actually get me to sleep.

A slightly higher-quality option that you will have to pay for can be found at the Unexplainable Store. This site features a variety of binaural tracks for falling asleep as well as numerous others for meditation, self-motivation, hypnosis and other common self-help and New Age themes. Prices for individual tracks typically range from $9.95 to 19.95, and packages are available. There is also an 8-week money-back guarantee, so you really have nothing to lose. The only disadvantage is that like the free tracks listed above, these are binaural tracks and must be listened to on headphones.

The most complete Brainwave Entrainment insomnia program I’ve seen-the one I decided to shell out the cash for and try- is Sleep Tracks. In addition to three high-quality CDs that you can play on your stereo or computer with no headphones needed, you’ll get access to a series of online videos that, along with the audio tracks, provide a complete sleep re-education program. A lot of the video content is tips and information we’ve all heard from doctors and well-meaning friends and relatives before but something about hearing it all delivered in a soothing, authoritative voice accompanied by soft images made it very effective. The videos completely changed my outlook on sleep and made me much more relaxed about going to bed, which had become a moment I dreaded.

And the CDs really work. I’ve never once gotten to the end of any of them without falling asleep. Of course, the idea behind this treatment is to ultimately retrain the insomniac’s brain so that even listening to the CDs isn’t necessary. I’ve been using the CDs for a week and haven’t yet tried a night without them. Look for a follow-up article in a week or so when I attempt sleeping with no help at all.