Sleeping pills are medication used to help people with sleeping problems, either caused by stress, anxiety, or a sleeping disorder. In fact, they’re one of the most common prescription medications in the United States. The CDC states that 5% of women and 3.5% of men have a prescription for sleeping pills. And, that usage is not counting the millions who abuse these drugs for recreational or self-medication purposes. Sleeping pills are popular. Unfortunately, they’re also addictive and dangerous.
At the same time, sleeping pills aren’t necessarily bad. They solve a valuable purpose for many people, improving health and quality of life. For those of us with major problems sleeping, sleeping aids like Zolpidem enable rest and recovery. But, if you or a loved one is using them, it’s important to understand the history, risks, and abuse potential of these drugs. That’s even more true if you’re using them outside of a prescription, which means you don’t have the benefit of medical management or a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy.
Sleeping pills comprise a class of drugs known as hypnotics, which can include one of several types of medication. In fact, there are over a dozen medications used to induce sleep approved by the FDA. Here, the most popular include Zolpidem/Ambien, Zaleplon/Sonata, Eszopiclone/Lunesta, and Triazolone. While each has a slightly different mechanism of action, they all result in muscle relaxation, normally through the central nervous system, allowing the body to relax into sleep. Some also affect other parts of the brain and body through Gabapentin, dopamine, and serotonin, but most function primarily as muscle relaxants and hypnotics. So, you relax and fall asleep but potentially lose some muscle control and may talk or act as though inebriated if you stay awake.
Here, many create a “high” feeling of relaxation, drowsiness, and light euphoria. In high doses, zolpidem can cause euphoria, hallucinations, and relaxation. In addition, most people experience effects similar to alcohol of reduced coordination and motor skills as well as dizzy spells. This makes it dangerous to operate machinery or to combine with alcohol – which can increase the effects of both and result in an increased risk of hospitalization.
Sleeping pills, in the simplest form of sleeping aids, date back almost as far as human history. However, the modern form dates back to the mid-1800s with chloral hydrate. This drug was used to suppress the body, providing an intoxicating effect. It was quickly adopted as a sleeping aid. By the early 1900s, barbiturates were used to replace chloral hydrate, as they had both a stronger sedative effect and resulted in fewer risks to health. By the 1970s, modern drugs like quinazolinones and benzodiazepines were introduced.
Today, those drugs are still popular. However, most doctors prefer to prescribe drugs like zolpidem, sonata, eszopiclone, triazolam, mirtazapine, clonidine, and even diphenhydramine instead. In most cases, these drugs are prescribed in short periods of a few weeks – offering users the chance to sleep while hopefully getting therapy or another form of treatment for sleeping issues. In fact, in most cases, sleeping medication in combination with cognitive behavioral therapy is considered the most effective way to treat sleep issues caused by anxiety, depression, and many other mental health disorders. This means that for non-sleep-disorder issues, sleeping aids are often prescribed for as little as 8 weeks. That’s vastly different from as little as 10 years ago, when sleeping aids might be prescribed for years or even decades at a time with little oversight.
Those shifts in approach largely tie into the increasing understanding that sleeping aids are addictive and often dangerous. In fact, in 2010, some 64,000 people were hospitalized from a single medication used for sleeping pills (zolpidem), with over 1/3rd because of overmedication. This, plus increasing crackdowns on unregulated prescriptions means that it’s now more difficult than ever to abuse a sleeping aid prescription. Yet, many people still do. In fact, an estimated 0.2% of the U.S. population abuses or is addicted to a prescription tranquilizer or sleeping aid.
Today, an estimated 4% of Americans have a prescription for sleeping medication, with 9 million prescriptions for Zolpidem alone. While many of these prescriptions are short term, many more have been running for years – and doctors don’t have oversight or options to offer therapy and treatment to help people off them. In many cases, those sleeping aids are vital to quality of life for the people who take them.
In addition, sleeping pills are linked to abuse for both recreational and self-medication purposes. Here, users often combine sleeping pills with alcohol to get a stronger high. Others buy sleeping pills to relax or to destress. Drugs are often bought and sold for a few dollars a pill, stollen from friends or family, or acquired through means like doctor shopping.
In addition, self-medication, or the process of using a drug to treat issues like not being able to sleep, can result in addiction. Here, users often feel anxiety about not sleeping. After all, you have responsibilities, things to do, and want to feel and do your best. Being unable to sleep prevents that. This can result in a self-defeating cycle of being anxious that you won’t’ sleep without sleeping aids, and then the anxiety keeping you awake, so you have to take the sleeping pills every day to sleep. This is one way that people with prescriptions can become hooked on the drug.
At the same time, most sleeping pills are incredibly habit forming. That relates to both stress and the incredibly negative impact of being unable to sleep and the fact that the drugs themselves quickly form physical dependencies. In fact, drugs like zolpidem score higher than both heroin and methamphetamine on the scale of forming physical dependence. In most cases, Ambien can result in physical dependence, or withdrawal symptoms on cessation, in as little as 7 days of daily use.
If you or a loved one is struggling with sleeping pills, you’re far from alone. While often necessary for health, many of these drugs are addictive, habit forming, and dependence inducing. People who use them end up with both physical and mental dependencies, resulting in behavioral changes including addiction. That’s true whether you have a prescription or started taking sleeping pills for recreational purposes or even to self-medicate.
Unfortunately, it’s never safe to simply quit these drugs. Most sleeping medications interact with the central nervous system. You can go into withdrawal which might include seizures. It’s always important to seek out medical attention and taper off the drug or seek out medication to help you detox safely. In addition, addictions are also about behavioral addictions. This means that if you simply quit taking a sleeping medication, you’re only solving one part of the problem. The mental addiction is still there, meaning risk of relapse is high. That puts you at increased risk of overdose if you do relapse, because tolerance goes down quickly.
Addiction treatment including detox, behavioral therapy like CBT and DBT, and counseling can help you to recover safely and fully. Treatment involves detoxing under medical supervision. It also means assessing behavioral problems and motivations, working on underlying problems and treating the reason for initial use, and finding solutions and coping mechanisms for underlying problems and cravings. That means you get the best possible chance at building a new life, where you don’t need sleeping medication to cope.
If you have any questions about our drug rehab and alcohol rehab programs, contact us today to speak in complete confidence with one of our experienced and caring addiction treatment team.
Asana Recovery is licensed and certified by the State Department of Health Care Services.
© Copyright 2024 Asana Recovery™ | All Rights Reserved | Privacy Policy
Asana Recovery
We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers).
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs. There may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to