The National Institutes of Health has stated that there are about 70 million people with sleep problems though this may be a misleading number.
The researchers included people suffering with insomnia, jet lag, sleepwalking, bed wetting, night terrors, restless leg syndrome, narcolepsy and sleep apnea (breathing disorder) in documents from 2006.
The Global market for sleeping pills will rise to over $5 Billion in the next several years.
Currently $2 billion is being spent on Ambien, the most popular sleeping pill on the market today.
It has been recently reported that some Ambien users experience amnesia, walking in their sleep and sometimes find themselves eating in the middle of the night.
How effective are sleeping pills? Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, both in Boston, discovered by changing sleep habits and attitudes chronic insomnia was treated more effectively, over the short- and long-term, than sleeping pills (specifically Ambien).
A recent study published in the British Medical Journal published a study demonstrating the risks of taking sleeping pills (benzodiazepines and other sedatives, in this case) outweighed the benefits among people over 60 in a series of studies carried out between 1966 and 2003.
The subjects slept more but were twice as likely to fall or be involved in a car crash due to the dizziness they experienced as a result of taking the pills.
The University of Alberta found the hormone melatonin to be ineffective in treating jet lag and problems with sleeping associated with medical problems.
Here are some suggestions to help you to get better sleep: Stop taking sleeping pills.
This includes over-the-counter pills and melatonin.
Go to bed when you are sleepy.
If you have trouble sleeping, try going to bed later or getting up earlier.
Get up at the same time every morning, even after a bad night's sleep.
The next night, you'll be sleepy at bedtime.
If you are awaking in the middle of the night, get out of bed and do something till you are feeling sleepy.
When you go back to bed you will find it easy to fall asleep.
Use your bed for sleeping only.
Read and watch TV in a different space in your home.
Stop eating and drinking six hours before you go to bed.
Avoid alcohol can lead to insomnia when it clears your system.
Spend time outdoors.
People exposed to daylight or bright light therapy sleep better.
If you still have not been able to get decent nights sleep, I would suggest that you think about any times when you might have had some emotional trauma occur either right before you went to bed, or during the time that you were supposed to be sleeping.
I have found it rather easy to clear these emotional traumas for my clients using hypnosis usually in one session with a follow-up demonstrating the resolution of the problem.
Sometimes these triggers happen before we are even able to remember them, like when we are a toddler of one or two years of age.
In this case a simple regression to recall the experience followed by desensitizing the event can bring you great relief.
Here is a real life example of how this can happen.
I had anesthesiologist come in with a sleeping problem since he was about a year old.
He had remembered his parents telling him of a traumatic incident that occurred when he was only a year old of his choking on some nuts.
Sleeping with others in dorms also created more difficult times trying to sleep as they snored.
Through his medical training it was difficult to sleep when he was on call all through the night.
In all, this gentleman had 23 events through his life that created his difficulty getting sleep.
All that was necessary was to place him in a deep enough trance state so that he could bring up each of the events and then desensitize each one of the events.
In one session the problem was gone.