Sleepless in America is not a Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks movie. This is a real-life drama fueled by the performance anxiety that keeps you up all night worrying about being up all night. If you battle nightly dream stealers, you are one of fifty to seventy million American adults with chronic sleep disorders. We live in a take a pill and go to sleep era. Like Pavlovs dogs, insomnia-plagued Americans have been trained to pop a pill to reap a sleep reward, expecting to immediately fall asleep and stay asleep, with little or no effort. The path of least resistance offers an easy way out rather than focusing on the root cause of the insomnia. What do you hope to achieve by taking a sleeping pill? You hope to achieve a blissful state of restful and rejuvenating sleep, allowing you to then work better, think better, and function better the next day. You hope that prescription sleep aids will be a temporary fix and will not result in long-term use or dependence. Expectations and actual experiences may vastly differ, often yielding more disappointing results than anticipated. Your health choices are being unfairly influenced by clever pharmaceutical marketing propaganda, resulting in a destructive drug path plagued with dangerous side effects, interactions, drug-induced diseases, nutrient depletions, and even addiction. If sleeping pills are the problem, Undrugged Sleep is the solution that will help you embark on a personal healing journey. Becoming more aware of sleep drugs health-impairing issues will help motivate you to remove the drug insult, correct the root cause, and ultimately replace the drug with safer natural solutions. A functional medicine approach offers insomnia drug alternatives, combining sleep hygiene, nutrition, and nutraceuticals. No more Band-Aid approaches to healing; Undrugged Sleep is a true drug-free solution that will restore rejuvenating rest and have you sleeping like a baby in no time. Undrugged: Sleep From Imsonia to Un-somnia -- Why Sleeping Pills Don't Improve Sleep and the Drug-Free Solutions That Will By Lori Arnold Balboa Press Copyright © 2018 Dr. Lori Arnold, PharmD. All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-5043-9747-6 Contents Introduction, ix, Section 1 Are Sleep Drugs Worsening Your Insomnia?, Chapter 1 Insomnia: A Medical Indication in Need of a Drug, 3, Chapter 2 Sleepless in America, 7, Chapter 3 Trouble Sleeping? We Have a Drug for That, 12, Chapter 4 The Truth About Z-Drugs: A Pharmacist's Synopsis, 17, Chapter 5 Side Effects and Complications: Is the Benefit Worth the Risk?, 30, Chapter 6 Complex Sleep-Related Disorders, Parasomnias, and "Zolpidem Zombies", 37, Chapter 7 Lawsuits and Legal Woes: The "Zolpidem Defense", 47, Chapter 8 Unvitamin Effect: Nutrient Depletions, 49, Section 2 From Insomnia to Un-somnia: Undrugged Solutions to Naturally Promote Sleep, Chapter 9 The Undrugged Method, 53, Chapter 10 Readjust: Adopt Better Sleep Habits, 63, Chapter 11 Drug-Induced Disease: Drugs, Herbs, and Supplements That Can Cause Insomnia, 78, Chapter 12 Replenish and Restore: Drug Alternatives, 83, Chapter 13 Refresh: Healing with Food, 100, Conclusion, 117, Endnotes, 119, Index, 139, CHAPTER 1 Insomnia: A Medical Indication in Need of a Drug Once upon a time, drug companies promoted drugs to treat disease. Now it is often just the opposite. They promote diseases to fit their drugs. — Marcia Angell, MD, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and author of The Truth about Drug Companies We live in a "take a pill and go to sleep" era. Like Pavlov's dogs, insomnia-plagued Americans have been trained to pop a pill to reap a sleep reward, expecting to immediately fall asleep and stay asleep, with little or no effort. It is the path of least resistance, giving us an easy-way-out option, rather than confronting the root cause of our insomnia. Just "set it and forget it" so we can discretely walk away from our responsibility to identify our own underlying issues. Knowing this, it should come as no surprise that 25 percent of Americans take insomnia medications every year. Twenty years ago, Ambien (zolpidem) was introduced to the market — hailed as the supposed solution to all of our sleep complaints. Ambien belongs to a category of sleep agents called Z-drugs, originally promising to provide us with a safer alternative to benzodiazepines without a hangover effect or overdose potential. Z-drugs quickly became widely overused, and many consumers fell victim to the increased risk of addiction. Yes, you and I got hooked; according to a 2013 analysis published by the Addiction Center, over nine million Americans routinely use sleeping pills and 30 percent are dependent. With up to seventy million Americans using sleeping pills today, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has even deemed insufficient sleep as a public health epidemic. The situation seems to have gotten out of hand, allowing the thief of sle