Poison that makes a restorative ‘sleep’… There is no sleeping pill that only gives you a good night's sleep

23-05-17

[Hankyoreh S] Shin Chan-young's mind poison, mind medicine - Z-Drug

Looking at the ‘Sleeping Woman’ carved out of clay thousands of years ago, excavated from an underground temple in Valletta, an ancient city on the Mediterranean coast, you can feel that the ancients also longed for a good night’s sleep. It's so delicious, the sight of sleeping arouses the desire for sleep.

‘Four per five rocks.’ There is an old saying that if you sleep for 4 hours, you will pass the college entrance exam, and if you sleep for 5 hours, you will fail. Sleeping for 4 hours every day couldn't have been good for learning. It is said that Napoleon slept only 4 hours a day, but during the day, it is said that he dozed off on horseback. The Guinness Book of World Records for the longest time without sleep was set in 1964 by an American high school student named Randy Gardner, who stayed awake for 11 days without sleeping. This record cannot be broken forever because the Guinness Book of World Records does not recognize the category of ‘not sleeping long’ as a record because of various health risks such as delirium, hallucinations, confusion of consciousness, and muscle spasms. Rats that are not forced to sleep die. Sleep is medicine and life.

Still the next best thing, ‘sleep inducer’

About 20% of the population experiences sleep disorders, and women usually experience about 40% more than men. The social loss due to sleep disorders is huge enough to reach 130 trillion won annually in the United States. If you do not sleep properly, you will have problems with concentration, cognitive function, social life and interpersonal relationships. Sleep disorders are associated with various diseases, including metabolic syndrome, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). If you have a sleep disorder, more amyloid, which should be released from the brain during sleep, accumulates in the brain, and if this continues for a long time, it is said that Alzheimer's disease is caused or worsened. To avoid getting dementia, you need to sleep well.

If changing your sleep-related lifestyle is difficult or ineffective, you may end up seeking help from medication. The ideal hypnotic should have a rapid onset of action and a moderate duration. REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and slow-wave sleep (slow-wave sleep) structure should not be changed and should help brain function and activity after sleeping. After awakening, there should be no sedation, respiratory failure, tolerance and dependence, and no interaction with alcohol. If you stop taking the medicine, do not cause insomnia again as a rebound effect, and do not cause memory loss like drinking and cutting off a film. But, unfortunately, there is no such drug yet, as can be seen from what was said to be the ‘ideal sleeping pill’.

Antihistamines, a component of cold medicine, are also used as sleep aids, but full-fledged sedative-hypnotics usually have the effect of activating inhibitory nerves in the brain. Barbituric acid derivatives, which were used in the early days, have a severe respiratory depressant effect, and until the 1980s, many people, including actress Marilyn Monroe, committed suicide or poisoned death by using drugs with alcohol. Dependence and resistance to sleeping pills of the benzodiazepine series developed later have become a problem, and there is a great concern about the action of anterograde amnesia, to the extent that some substances are used for sleep anesthesia or abused as date rape drugs. It has sedative and muscle-relaxing effects, so it has been rumored that a small amount of it helps to putt well, so abuse has become a problem.

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Randy Gardner, who set the Guinness record for not sleeping in high school, confessed in his late 70s to an American radio station that he suffered from severe insomnia. He said on the air that there are three important things for humans. These are ‘water, food’ and ‘sleep’. I wish for a world where there is no need for stimulants and sleeping pills, full of days when you can stretch out and sleep comfortably without having to force yourself to sleep.