Sleeping pills and the myth of the easy fix

Dettaglio del sogno di Santa Orsola by Carlo Naya, courtesy of Widimedia Commons

A man I know, Peter, was having some health problems. He went to his doctor, and while they were talking, Peter’s trouble getting to sleep came up. So his doctor prescribed Ambien, a popular brand of sleeping pill. Peter started sleeping better right away.

But last week, a study that linked sleeping pills to major diseases has Peter wondering about his own risk.

The study, done by researchers at Scripps Clinic in San Diego, says that people who use sleeping pills are at a greater risk for diseases such as cancer and heart disease than people who don’t use sleeping pills. And this whopper: The study says that people who use sleeping pills have a 4.6 higher risk of death.

With millions of patients using these handy little pills on a regular basis, there’s some freaking out going on. Some patients are responding with a clear message: “I’d rather be able to sleep and live a shorter life.” But some people are understandably worried. And there are doctors who say the study isn’t conclusive and that more studies need to be done before we can say that sleeping pills are risky. But however people greet the news, this is an issue for the almost one out of every ten adults in this country who uses sleeping pills.

It’s so easy to see how this kind of thing happens. Sleep is such a tonic; who doesn’t love to sleep? Without it, our worlds quickly become jagged, stressful, and unmanageable. We need to sleep. When sleep is hard to come by, we become desperate to try just about anything. Health-care providers want to help, and a sleeping pill can seem like a good answer.

Whether sleeping pills are helping to kill people will continue to be a subject of debate. But this study underscores that medications often cause more problems than they solve.

And this brings up something that I believe deeply in: that we are the most powerful force for our own health and wellness. But let me remind you that I am not a purist about most things. Antibiotics have saved my family many times over. When my kid couldn’t breathe in the middle of the night, I was eternally grateful for steroids. When excruciating pain knocked me off my feet, you can be sure that I took the scary pain meds. Modern medicine is my friend.

But I will repeat the unlikely advice from my neurosurgeon: “The body’s natural trajectory is one of healing.” This from a woman whose primary training is cutting people open to fix them.

And she’s right, of course. So if we can’t sleep, or we are overweight, or we are depressed, or something isn’t right in our bodies, the first and most important thing to consider is what are we doing to contribute to the problem and what can we do to help ourselves heal?

There are many practical, simple things that we can do to get a good night’s sleep. We can stop drinking caffeine and eating chocolate. Yes, really. We can exercise regularly. We can nap during the day, which can actually help us sleep at night (read Take a Nap, Change Your Life). We can create a sleep routine and have a bedtime. A bedtime? For grownups? Yep. We can turn off the television and the computer two hours before going to bed. We can create a dark, quiet sleeping space. We can.

Or we could pop an Ambien. I know that there are people out there who do all they can to get good sleep and a restful night still eludes them. I’m not interested in making anyone into a bad guy for taking a medication they need. And I’m certainly not interested in deciding who needs what.

But sleep, like much of how we take care of ourselves, requires some investigation, some commitment, and some work. When things in our bodies go wrong, the first useful place to look is at our own behavior.

Our bodies are sophisticated and miraculous. They will tell us when something we’re doing isn’t working for them. And when we give them the support that they’re looking for, our bodies can heal from incredible pain, devastating disease, and problems that can feel like a death sentences. 

But time and again, we look for that support from some other place. We imagine that our solution comes from some external factor: a doctor who has a cure, a magic drink that will solve our problem, or a pill that alleviates our pain. And, just about as often, we find that the easy solution, the quick fix, the pill to solve the problem simply creates more problems than it’s worth.

Peter walked into a doctor he had never seen before. He spent fifteen minutes with him and walked out with a prescription for sleeping pills. The doctor didn’t ask him about his caffeine use, let alone his nicotine or other drug use. The doctor didn’t ask him about his diet. The doctor didn’t ask him about his exercise habits or if he had a routine for getting to sleep. And the doctor didn’t mention meditation or other stress-relieving exercises.

This is frustrating because a lot of these factors affect our sleep. Every office visit to a health-care provider is an opportunity to educate people about their own responsibility for their health. It’s frustrating that health-care providers aren’t always able to have this discussion with their patients. The best doctors teach us how to care for ourselves. But often, people are likely to get pills instead of education for a number of reasons, including short doctors’ visits, enormous sales pressure from drug companies, and perhaps the biggest problem of all—a lot of patients are screaming for easy, fast fixes to complex problems that stem from deeply ingrained habits.

The quick fix is almost always problematic. So we find ourselves dealing with yet another scare. Yesterday it was fen-phen. Today it’s sleeping pills. Can we do something different tomorrow?

What if we decided to take our own bodies into consideration instead? What if we decided to educate ourselves about what our bodies need? What if we decided to actively care for the absolute best resource that we will ever have?

We could learn to treat our health-care providers with respectful attention and to genuinely expect them to teach us something about how to care for this vessel. We could stop expecting them to fix problems that we ourselves are not willing to address in concrete and new ways. We could expand our knowledge about practical, useful, and holistic practices that clearly improve our chances at wellness.

We could. Maybe we should.

Our bodies are a miracle of nature. Since the time of Hippocrates, we’ve known that the natural order of our bodies is one of healing. If we give them what they need—sleep, mindfulness, healthy food, and movement—there is little that our bodies won’t take care of for us. What are we doing to help ourselves?