Insomnia is absolutely pervasive in our culture. Nearly one in four of you reading this will have problems getting a good night's sleep.

I realize that insomnia is quite common, but I can personally count on one hand the number of times I was challenged with falling asleep. However, I attribute that to a healthy lifestyle of going to bed early, exercising and not being on any medications.

Part of the problem is that in industrialized countries the older you become the more likely you will be taking a prescription drug. Two out of every three visits to the doctor result in a drug being prescribed. A study done four years ago showed that more than 12 percent of Americans over 65 are taking eight or more different drugs.

How can you sleep well with eight different drugs? It is a mystery to me how anyone taking eight medications could hope to sleep well.

So the first order of business would be to start a plan to wean off your prescription drugs. I have seen many very sick patients and it is very unusual where it wasn't possible to radically reduce, if not eliminate, all the drugs they were taking by adopting the Total Health Program.

Let me caution you, though, that this weaning should be done under the supervision of a trained health care professional who has studied pharmacology and understands all the potential risks and necessary steps to helping you wean off the medications.

After the drug issue you will want to address lifestyle issues. There are loads of great tips in the first link below. Many have benefited from using these approaches.

After you have addressed the lifestyle issues you will certainly want to address stress, as it seems to be the most common reason that people struggle with insomnia. Stress can lead to dysfunction in your adrenal glands, which tends to perpetuate the problem.

I have found three highly effective and practical solutions that address the stress component. It is important to understand that these recommendations are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it is likely that if you use them together they are highly synergistic.

Three Powerful Methods to Address Stress Causing Insomnia

• Exercise. Without question this is one of my favorites. It is one of nature's best tranquilizers and most people notice an immediate improvement in their sleeping once they start a program.

• Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) is a gentle tapping on specific energy meridians in your body that is remarkably effective. There is no cost to this powerful technique other than time.

• Brainwave Synchronization. This is a great tool that seems to consistently work for the patients that I recommend it to. It is a CD that you listen to before you go to sleep at night. The CD plays out a phase of pleasant sounding frequencies that resonate your brain to relaxation frequencies. It is very similar to meditation in that you achieve a deep delta wave state. The only major difference is that you achieve this state in a few sessions rather than many years of hard work.

You might call this the lazy man's solution to sleeping well. It is one of my favorites, especially when used with the approaches described above.

Related Articles:

Guide to a Good Night's Sleep

Lack of Daylight May Cause Insomnia

If You Sleep Less Than Six Hours You Are Creating a 'Sleep Debt'

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