My Mothers Sleep Aid
by Tanja Lexington Ne
(USA)
About two years ago I started having difficulty falling and staying asleep. At first I thought that I would get over it and that it was just a phase.
Of course that did not happen. Really it got worse. It had gotten to the point that I dreaded nighttime because all I had to look forward to was a whole night of tossing and turning. I was even a little jealous of my husband who was next to me sleeping the night away while I lied there literally counting sheep. I went to our local pharmacy and asked the pharmacist for advice. He told me just to buy one of those over the counter pm pain medications. I saw that just about every major pain medication manufacturer like Advil, Tylenol, Alka Seltzer and many others sold a pm version. I decided on Tylenol pm gels since I already had good experiences with their pain medicines and the price was fairly reasonable. That very same evening about an hour before bedtime I took two caplets with a glass of water as directed on the package insert. While lying on the couch and watching TV I felt myself getting very sleepy all of a sudden. My husband told me that he was talking to me and that I was not responding. Evidently I had dozed off. After saying my good nights I was off to bed. And for the first time in a very long time I fell asleep immediately. The next day I woke up and felt rested, a feeling I haven’t had in a while. For the following month I continued to take the Tylenol Pm Gels. The only thing was that after about two weeks into using my new-found sleep aid I noticed that it was not as effective as when I first used it. I started to increase the dosage. Instead of two I just started taking three. I started getting worried because I knew that sleep-aids can be addictive. I did not want to end up depending on medication to go to sleep either. I stopped taking the sleeping pills, but was back at square one. Back to sleepless nights. Then I started thinking back to when I was a kid. Sometimes when my mum could not sleep she used to always drink a cup of tea. I called her and asked her what kind of tea that was. She told me that that was fennel tea mixed with chamomile tea and that she drank it to get a better nights rest. For the last year and a half I have been drinking the tea my mum said would work wonders and to my surprise it does work pretty good. I drink the tea around and hour before going to bed. It has a very calming affect on me. It helps me wind down and I do sleep a lot better than I used to. True, every now and again I still get one of those nights where I don’t sleep as well, but it is a lot less often and now I don’t have to worry about addiction problems and having to increase my sleeping pill dose. I am not saying that those over the counter sleep aids are bad. They do work and in my opinion are a great way to help get some sleep if you are using them every now and then, just not on a permanent basis.
