I Take A Sedative To Fall Asleep Every Night & I Have No Intention Of Stopping

Sleep deprivation is a form of torture. At some point in every adult’s life, you find out why the hard way. Every parent goes through intense sleep deprivation when they bring home their first baby, and every subsequent newborn after that. But for some of us, sleep never came easy. By the time the babies came on the scene, we were well acquainted with the wee hours of the morning, what it felt like to be up all night, every night.

As a kid, I remember lying in bed for long stretches of time before I could fall asleep. My thoughts would race about everything and nothing. I had a dream catcher above my bed to ward off nightmares, worry dolls under my pillow to whisper my anxieties to so they could “hold them for me” until the morning, and my bedroom TV volume on low while a plucky Disney Channel show played. At sleepovers I was always the last to fall asleep, if I managed to stay overnight at all.

I didn’t get a formal anxiety diagnosis until I went off to college many years later, but learning more about my brain finally gave me an understanding of why sleep was so elusive. With a nervous system stuck in fight-or-flight mode, of course I’d wake at the slightest sound and have a nearly impossible time winding down enough to knock out at the end of the day.

Finally, in 2019, I expressed my frustrations to my new psychiatrist. I was awake for hours every night waiting for sleep to come, while my husband was already in REM before he ever got fully horizontal on the mattress. I tried guided meditations (why do all the beach ones feature squawking seagulls?) and binaural beats and exercising with the goal of exhausting myself during the day, but my insomnia had reached a frustrating new intensity. It was making my anxiety and depression so much worse; I looked and felt utterly bedraggled. So, he prescribed me trazodone.

While trazodone isn’t a true sedative — it’s actually an antidepressant — it’s often used off-label to treat insomnia because it gives you a similar relaxing, drowsy feeling. My doctor told me that it’s not a controlled substance and carries a very low risk of addiction, but that mentally, I might start to feel like I need it in order to sleep. If I didn’t like feeling dependent on it, we could make some changes.

“Are they going to stop making it any time soon?” I asked.

“No...” he hedged.

“Is it bad to take long-term for any other reason?”

“No.”

“Then I’m perfectly fine with being mentally addicted,” I said. And I’ve taken it every single night since then.

______________________________

Research has shown again and again that regularly sleeping well is a key quality-of-life indicator. Lack of sleep negatively impacts every system of the body, weakening the immune system, worsening mental health, and increasing risk of countless conditions, from high cholesterol to Alzheimer’s. Women are twice as likely to have insomnia as men, which has been attributed to our natural hormonal fluctuations throughout the month and the fact that we tend to carry the lion’s share of the mental load in the family, on top of being more prone to mood disorders.

Yet even though we know all of this, taking anything to help you fall asleep is still... kind of frowned upon. Researchers in the UK conducted focus groups interviewing people who take prescription sleep medications and OTC supplements, like melatonin, and found that they had a lot of internalized stigma around the subject — even when talking about it in a room full of people who also take something to help them sleep.

They found that participants were very deliberate in how they explained their need for their meds. They’re deserving (explaining that their condition, like chronic pain or anxiety, makes sleep impossible without medication). They’re compliant, only ever taking their meds exactly as prescribed (or, in the case of supplements, as directed on the label). They’re responsible, always watching themselves for signs of addiction or misuse. They expressed extreme guilt over taking more of their medications than they should, or trying alternative medications meant to make them sleepy when their usual prescription wasn’t enough.

We recently asked Scary Mommy’s Instagram followers the question, “Do you take anything to fall asleep at night?” Some of that same stigma showed up in their responses too.

Multiple readers said they take Gravol when they can’t sleep, calling it a “horrid habit” or something they only do “when things get really bad.” Another said, “I can’t sleep without a quarter of an Ambien. It’s terrible!” “Haven’t had an unmedicated sleep in 7+ years 🫠,” said one response. The melting face is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

Of course there were plenty of Scary Mommies who felt no shame (that’s sort of our shtick around here). In response to the question “Do you take anything to fall asleep?” one user simply replied, “WINE.” Plenty of other respondents also take trazodone, or Unisom, or some other sleep aid. Weed, whether in vape or gummy form, is also an extremely popular option. See also: a large number of replies indicating they take magnesium and progesterone at night thanks to perimenopause, and that HRT was finally the thing to help them sleep through the night.

But one response really captures my feelings about the whole subject:

“Oh lord I’m so medicated. But it’s working.”

Even on the days I feel like I shouldn’t have to take something to help me sleep, that perhaps I could sleepmaxx or wellness hack my way out of having to take a pill every night, I remind myself that not getting enough sleep is literally deadly.

When you’re someone who struggles with sleep night after night, you know how quickly your mental and physical health can plummet. Insomnia decimates my quality of life. Sleep deprivation locks my personality and my joy away behind a concrete wall where I can’t access them anymore. It impacts my longevity and my relationships. While I’m not saying every reader who responded has a healthy way of getting to sleep at night, or that we shouldn’t be critical of our relationships with substances, I think we could all use a little validation that not getting enough sleep is, in fact, torturous.

More moms need to hear that they deserve to sleep well. They should know that their doctors want to hear from them if they feel abnormally tired during the day. And I want more women to internalize the idea that this world is hard enough to live in as it is. You should at least be able to meet it each day not feeling like a shell of yourself.

And that’s why you can pry my trazodone out of my cold, dead hands.