Tranquilizers Can Affect Sleep, Part 1

A number of researchers, among them psychiatrists Raymond Greenberg and Chester Pearlman of the Veterans Hospital in Jamaica Plains, Massachusettes, says tranquilizers do interfere with sleep.

And this is how Greenberg and Pearlman explain their findings:

People who take tranquilizers or barbiturates to get sleep are dangerously altering their sleep patterns, and drugs taken on a regular basis make it impossible for the body to get the most beneficial stage of sleep – Stage 1, or the REM (rapid eye movement) phase.  According to them, during REM time, we act out our frustrations or sift through the day’s experience or indulge in wish fulfillment.  So important are dreams as a safety valve that when we are deprived of REM time one night, we will spend twice as much time dreaming the next night. If we deprive ourselves of dream time over a period of nights by taking drugs, we may show signs of disturbed, often neurotic daytime behavior.

Mentally disturbed persons, by taking tranquilizers or barbiturates often prescribed by their physicians to induce sleep, may be lowering their REM time to such a degree that their irrepressible need to dream expresses itself during waking hours and produces bizarre behavior.

There are ways of getting rest you need without resorting to sleeping pills.  One of the best is a combination exercise / relaxation routine.  Frederick Baekland, M.D., D.M.Sc., of the State University of New York, Brooklyn, reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry of April 1970 that people who follow a regular exercise program experience more healthful invigorating sleep than those who don’t exercise.

Baekland used it on student volunteers, recording their brain wave patterns during sleep for one month.  During this time, students, all physically active, were not permitted to exercise.

Near the end of the month of exercise deprivation, the students were asked to fill out questionnaires concerning their experiences and feelings during the test period.

In studying the EEG charts and completed questionnaires, Baekland found that the most striking change was that the REM density (period of light sleep with much dreaming) increased remarkably in the students deprived of exercise.  These students also reported more frequent awakenings during the night, a decrease in appetite, increase in sexual tension and need to be with others.  The EEG also recorded a higher number of body movements in the students deprived of exercise, perhaps their subconscious attempt to make up for the exercise they had lost.

(Part 2 will be posted on Monday, 29 Oct 2012 – J.P.)