You head to bed after a long day. It’s one o’clock in the morning. Now, it’s three. Then, it’s five a.m. You tossed. You turned. And, you had your glass of warm milk. This has been going on for months.
You’re not only mentally exhausted during the workday but you’re simply less yourself. You snap at the barista when you get the wrong mocha latté order one day. You stop going to yoga as often because you simply don’t have the emotional or physical energy to get through the poses.
You start to think that something is not right. Something is off. And, from a few Google searches, you find that your symptoms sound like you have insomnia. Insomnia is defined as a difficulty initiating or maintaining healthy sleep. With more than three million cases of insomnia reported each year in the United States, if you’re experiencing the symptoms of insomnia, you’re not alone.
And, while insomnia is incurable, you can treat it with these three strategies of insomnia alternative treatments that don’t require potentially harmful, traditional medications.
Lifestyle Behavioral Changes | Insomnia Alternative Treatments
While insomnia can be triggered or exacerbated by disease or illness, there’s still no more beneficial way to impact your sleep than good nutrition and physical exercise.
A well-balanced, nutritious diet, such as the Healthy Eating Plate, that is provided by Harvard University’s School of Public Health, is a great source for paying attention to one’s overall dietary fitness. If you eat the right foods, your body has the needed chemical compounds to release into the bloodstream at the right times in the evening to help you sleep at night.
Research studies into eating before sleep has noted that having small amounts of carbohydrates (and avoiding protein as you can) and beverages containing L-tryptophan (like, skim milk) can be helpful to induce slumber.
Exercise, especially resistance exercises, can be very beneficial to sleep. By doing exercise, this increases your body’s time in “deep sleep,” or the body’s stage of sleep that produces the most cell repair. And, there are many more benefits of setting your body up for deep sleep, but the primary point is that exercise stimulates sleep on multiple levels and that should be motivation enough to start moving.
The National Institutes of Health have Guidelines for Adults for physical activity of 150 minutes per week, which breaks down to approximately 30 minutes per day of moderate activity. If you’ve not been working out, make sure to start easier than you think and increase your exercise regimen slowly. Overdoing exercise can not only lead to injury but it can also backfire and harm your sleep, so consistency is more important for the long-term benefits of exercise to sleep.
As well, reduce or eliminate caffeine consumption at least four but up to six hours before you plan to go to sleep. The same goes for nicotine, as it’s a stimulant, consumption up to four hours before bed.
Herbal and Natural Ingestible Sleep Aids | Insomnia Alternative Treatments
From lifestyle behavior changes of nutrition and exercise you may get some much-needed rest, but it may not be enough. Enter herbal and natural ingestible sleep aids. There are a couple of insomnia alternative treatments readily available on the market that can provide you some relief from sleepless nights–melatonin and valerian root.
Melatonin is sometimes called the “sleep hormone” as it’s produced by your pineal gland in the brain in order to regulate your circadian rhythm, the functionality of which manages your ability to fall and stay asleep. Remarkably, in addition to animals producing melatonin, plants also produce this chemical for other purposes and from them we harvest melatonin as an all-natural ingestible sleep aid. Taken 30 to 60 minutes before the time you’d like to go to bed and melatonin mimics the sleep hormone your brain naturally produces to guide you into sleep. Also note that most over-the-counter dosages are much more than your body produces naturally so you will want to cut those pills down to smaller sizes typically. Take the smallest amount and test for a week or so at a time, only then increase to a slightly larger dose. From researching melatonin dosing, overdosing on melatonin can decrease your likelihood of falling asleep and increase your restlessness, so it’s not worth it to take more than you absolutely need before bed.
Valerian root was first discovered during the age of Ancient Greek and Rome (which started roughly around 750 B.C.) and used as a medicinal herb to induce and maintain sleep. It comes from the perennial flowering plant, Valerian. According to Healthline.com, dosage as a natural sleep aid is pretty simple. “Based on the available research, take 300 to 600 milligrams (mg) of valerian root 30 minutes to two hours before bedtime. This is best for insomnia or sleep trouble. For tea, soak 2 to 3 grams of dried herbal valerian root in 1 cup of hot water for 10 to 15 minutes.”
They go on to say that “valerian root seems to work best after taking it regularly for two or more weeks. Don’t take valerian root for more than a month without talking to your doctor.“
You can buy both of these as a dietary supplement in your local pharmacy and they’re taken orally before bed. If you’re taking other medications, or pregnant, please see a medical professional before taking any of these ingestible sleep aids.
While those are the primary ingestible sleep aids on the market, there are many more natural and homeopathic sleep aids that you can try (with the guidance of a skilled and licensed healthcare practitioner) as insomnia alternative treatments.
Digital Sleep Interventions | Insomnia Alternative Treatments
Remarkably, much of the digital connectedness we benefit from today is also a likely source of keeping insomniacs awake. Thankfully, the tech geeks are aware (since software developers are at high-risk to become insomniacs) and are on it!
The biggest culprit for stopping the production of melatonin as we discussed earlier is blue light emissions (BLE) from the screens of the devices we expose ourselves to day and night. These software and tools can help you mitigate the BLE from your favorite devices:
- Install this free software, f.lux, on your Windows, Mac, and Linux personal computers and laptops to gradually reduce the BLE as the sun sets.
- Android’s built-in Night Mode settings will help you do the same.
- And, Apple’s iOS Night Shift mode can be switched on to reduce those BLE for you, too.
- For the television, emitting the most BLE per square inch usually, there’s Drift TV box, which you connect between your TV and any content sources (cable box, DVD/Blu-Ray player, etc.), so your Netflix binges at night can be done without sacrificing an opportunity to slip into sleep.
Do your kids and elderly parents a favor and install or enable these on all their devices as well.
Brain.fm is a program that plays something called binaural beats. These are a set of sounds each played individually in your ears. By playing different sounds, the pulsating effect at specific tempos can induce stages of sleep, such as light and deep sleep. If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend that you try it out and see if it can help you fall asleep faster and more deeply.
New technologies are developing for next-level sleep for everyone. The below video describes new brainwave sleep music technology akin to binaural beats, by Dr. Daniel Gartenberg. So, even if you’ve tried everything and still struggle with insomnia, know that insomnia alternative treatments are being worked on to hopefully help you in the near future.
Do you suffer from insomnia? What tips or techniques do you use to get to sleep and sleep better?