Does Popping a Pill Really Improve Sleep?

We’ve all seen the television ads for medicines that supposedly help you drift off to sleep and rest peacefully throughout the night. The pleasant music playing, the drowsy-eyed actors smiling as they glide away into dreamland and then awake looking all fresh and renewed. For people who genuinely have trouble falling asleep, the idea of popping a pill to solve their problem sounds idyllic. After all, drug companies regularly cite research they’ve done that shows these medications definitely improve

Okay, they do improve the ability for a person to fall asleep. But for how long? One analysis of research into sleeping pill effectiveness found that the average improvement in the amount of total time sleeping with Lunesta, Ambien, and Sonata was only 11.4 minutes. Other studies have shown that people who use  for a long time actually wake up more often throughout the night than insomniacs who don’t use any drugs at all. So why are sleeping pills so popular, if their effectiveness is so sharply limited?

The reason sleeping pills seem effective is that they are sedative-hypnotics, which effectively depress brain functions, therefore interfering with cognitive abilities to create or store new memories. This condition, called "anterograde amnesia," works to impair nighttime memories. So you might wake up thinking that you slept solidly throughout the night, although you actually tossed and turned all night, losing sleep but not remembering that you didn’t sleep well.