I can’t help but sing the praises of melatonin. I picked some up at Meijers a week ago to help me overcome some sleeplessness. They are tiny 5mg pills and about an hour after taking one I feel a distinct urge to fall asleep. It’s way more pleasant than the one time I took a Advil PM because I had a headache and it was late at night and I figured what the hell. The ‘sleep aids’ that go in these pills may work for other people, and I’m not going to disparage them if they work for you, but for me the experience was incredibly unpleasant. Instead of naturally feeling drowsy and maintaining control it felt like I was going into a blackout. It wasn’t terrifying, but it was extremely unpleasant. The melatonin works with me instead of on me. I can retain consciousness if I need to, but it brings on some serious yawning and some definitely powerful feelings of drowsiness. Of course, this is not really the most natural way to fall asleep and I’m always very conscious of allowing myself to become dependent on them to help me get to sleep usually. So far I just used them once, and then yesterday at 4am after getting no sleep with this stupid coughing/congestion bit. By around 4:30 I was nice and asleep. One thing that I have noticed under the influence of melatonin is that I still have the ability to dream, which I’ve heard becomes stunted or disappears completely when you are taking stronger drugs to put yourself down to sleep, like Ambien and so on.

While browsing some news I came across a site detailing how some people with insomnia have a very hard time getting to sleep because their brains are “too hot” and that possibly getting a cooling system or maybe even an icepack might help initiate the proper descent into sleep. The article did say that one of the side effects of melatonin is that it cools the body, which makes sense. I sleep best when I’m cold and under the blankets. For me personally I can’t sleep with my feet bare, well, I can eventually sleep but it is not as quick and easy as if I had something on my feet. I’m the opposite of Scott, he needs to have bare feet, I need to have socks. The woolier and more fuzzy the better. It struck me, for all the people who I know who suffer from insomnia that you could work a kind of hat-trick to put yourself down to sleep using a strategy of chemicals, food, and conditions. I have only had one bout of insomnia when I was a little kid, but haven’t since then. I sort of wonder if something like this would work well for people with insomnia. Now before people get all bent and bothered, and yark about snopes.com and all, I’m just going by what I experience myself when it comes to these things.

1. For Dinner prepare a turkey breast with mashed potatoes and a vegetable of your preference. I’ve heard it said that turkey meat has a lot of tryptophan in it, and that can bring on a sense of drowsiness. I’ve also heard that cooking the turkey eliminates the tryptophan and even if it was in there, tryptophan doesn’t do what we think it does. It is my experience that after eating Thanksgiving dinner everyone is dead to the world. It’s purely anecdotal, but it can’t hurt, plus turkey is good for you. It could be just a grand carb-crash, but I like to think there is more to it than that. Perhaps it’s a chance to say hooray for the placebo effect. Turkey makes us sleepy because we’ve told ourselves that it does. 😉
2. 1 5mg pill of melatonin washed down with a glass of milk. The classic treatment for sleeplessness is a mug of warm milk, but I don’t think the temperature matters unless the warm milk helps soothe your throat somehow. Perhaps there are factors in the milk that bring on drowsiness and that if the milk is closer to body temperature that these factors move into your system faster. I don’t know. But again, does it hurt? If your lactose intolerant then water, but still.
3. Wrap an icepack in a washrag and slip it into your pillowcase. This will cool the back of your neck, along with the blood going up both arteries up to your brain. The brain will likely note the cooler blood and figure that it’s time to sleep.

If anyone tries these ideas, I would love to have comments to see if any of it worked for you. I like the idea of natural treatments replacing prescription drugs.