7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
skimps on useful stuff, quotes a lot of speculation, April 3, 2006
This review is from: How to Sleep Soundly Tonight: 250 Simple and Natural Ways to Prevent Sleeplessness (Paperback)
here's the only good I got from it:
*schedule your evening meal at least 3 hours before bedtime (same for exercise and caffeinated tea)
*eat a large breakfast, moderate lunch, and lighter dinner, or smaller frequent meals
*nap between 2 and 4 in the afternoon rather than earlier or later
*in warmer weather, open a window a crack to relieve stuffy air
*wear socks to bed
*try sleeping with a pillow between your knees
*try Reiki, acupuncture, acupressure, massage, yoga, and/or meditation
*try tryptophan or calcium-rich foods about an hour before bedtime: milk, yogurt, turkey, figs, dates, peanut butter, rice, tuna
*try carbohydrates 45 minutes before bedtime: toast, almonds and fruit, cereal, pasta
*sedative teas in moderate amounts about 30 minutes before bedtime: chamomile, catnip, or passionflower
*avoid msg, nicotine, and caffeine (300 milligrams disrupts REM)
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Help for the Sleepless, July 10, 2001
This review is from: How to Sleep Soundly Tonight: 250 Simple and Natural Ways to Prevent Sleeplessness (Paperback)
How to Sleep Soundly Tonight is a delightful little book. Written simply enough for anyone to understand, yet it is packed full of information for those who suffer from insomnia or other sleep problems.
The book starts out with a comprehensive list of ten things you can do today to sleep soundly tonight. These are not your everyday tips, but just a bit off the beaten track. Yet I can see the benefit of all of them.
Chapter one deals with how and why we should sleep. Do you know how much sleep you need? This chapter will help you decide what's right for you. Barbara also explains the difference between NREM and REM sleep. This chapter also deals with circadian rhythm, your biological clock and chronotherapy.
Are you a morning lark or a night owl? "Research suggests that only about 20 percent is truly at either extreme," Barbara explains in a sidebar, "but it is helpful to be aware of your own tendencies."
Do you dream? Barbara explains that most of us dream as much as two hours a night. More important, why do we dream? You'll find the answer in Sleep Soundly Tonight.
Sleep patterns tend to change as people age. In chapter two of her book, Barbara discusses sleep from how to deal with fussy babies to the sleep debt entailed by the life of a teenager. Pregnancy alters a woman's sleep patterns, as does growing old. Barbara explodes the myth that senior citizens don't need as much sleep as they did when they were young. "It is a myth that the elderly don't need as much sleep," Barbara says, "but it is true that they don't seem to get as much." Why? You'll find the answer in the book.
In chapter three Barbara takes a look at sleep disorders and how to detect them. She discusses common sleep disorders - insomnia, sleep apnea, narcolepsy, restless leg syndrome and other disorders. Believe it or not, a lot of these sleep problems we seem to bring on with our erratic lifestyles, filling our time with work and play and not leaving enough hours for sleep. "This deliberate sleep deprivation," Barbara says, "may be a precursor to involuntary insomnia and other health problems."
Chapters four and five discuss our habits and our environment. There are ways to improve both these factors of our lives and thus improve our sleep. Chapter six is filled with excellent self-help tips, including bedtime rituals and napping. The last two and a half pages of this chapter contain hints from other people on how they cope with sleeplessness.
Ever tried meditation, creative visualization, yoga? In chapter seven, Barbara talks about all of these as a means of relaxing so you can fall asleep. She also discusses relaxation techniques like massage, reflexology, reiki and several more. How about music? "Music therapy has been shown to benefit patients in hospitals and nursing homes," Barbara says in chapter seven.
And then there's herbs - in your tea, in your pillow, in your bath or in the air. Barbara tells you in chapter eight how to brew chamomile tea, how to make herbal bath salts and how to make a herbal pillow. In this chapter she also discusses homeopathy and herbal supplements. An excellent end piece to this chapter tells us how to use herbs safely.
The final chapter tells us what to do if all these things we've tried still don't help. "Chronic medical problems often don't respond to self-help remedies," the author warns. "(Then) seek conventional medical assessment and treatment."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Barbara L. Heller, M.S,W,, is a psychotherapist/clinical social worker with more than 25 years experience in women's health care and complementary medicine.
Another books by Barbara L. Heller:
365 Ways to Relax Mind, Body and Soul on how to deal with the daily stress in our lives
Florence Cardinal Sleep disorders guide http://sleepdisorders.about.com
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Many Sound Ideas, But We Also Need a Word of Caution, March 11, 2006
This review is from: How to Sleep Soundly Tonight: 250 Simple and Natural Ways to Prevent Sleeplessness (Paperback)
As someone who has spent years helping people get control of their sleep/wake cycles, I'm always on the lookout for anything new that may help before we have to use prescription medications. There are a great many good ideas in this book, but also a couple of things about which we need to be careful.
I love it that Barbara starts with "Ten things you can do today to sleep soundly tonight", and that item six concerns temperature. Yet there is little further mention of the importance of temperature control, even though it is one of the key controllers of the sleep/wake cycle.
Though 90% of the suggestions are very sound, those for using herbal remedies worry me. I am very keen on the use of some herbal remedies, but with some caveats. Barbara is very good about mentioning the importance of discussing the use of St. John's Wort with a health care provider: there are scores of potential interactions of the herb with other herbs and prescription medicines. Sadly she doesn't go into the same detail with some of the other herbs that she recommends. Even when the book came out five years ago, there were already some worries about Kava-kava and Valerian. That shows the importance of supplementing any books - including my own! - with up-to-date information from critical review articles. Though there are thousands of things written on the Internet and in popular articles, there are not that many good, readily available and up-to-date critical review articles, so we are going to help fill the gap through richardgpettymd.com and psychiatricresourceforum.blogs.com.
Because I really like most of Barbara's suggestions, I'm going to give the book four stars, and hope that she has the time to produce a second edition to talk a bit about the pros and cons of herbal remedies, and the new data about using melatonin.
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