So you’ve decided you want to try herbal sleeping pills instead of dangerous prescription or over-the-counter sleep aids? Good for you! You’re one step closer to getting the healthful, restorative night’s sleep that your body needs to stay healthy and well. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, that’s where the good news stops and the bad news starts.
Here’s where the bad news begins: finding the right herbal sleep aid can be a challenge in and of itself. Celebrities get paid all the time to endorse pills that don’t work. Doctors make more money writing prescriptions than suggesting herbal remedies, so even if they have a suggestion, it’s not usually based on science. And as authoritative as some herbalists claim to be, many can be just as bad about selling you snake oil as the next shady businessman.
So what are you do? Well, we’re happy to report that we have more good news. Finding the right herbal sleeping pill requires that you do one thing, and one thing only: look at the ingredients list. People can say one herbal sleeping pill does this or another herbal sleeping pill does that, but you’ll know exactly what they do once you look at the list of active ingredients they have on the label. Certain ingredients do very specific things for your body. Learning about the most effective ones – which we are going to do today – will help you identify the phony pills from the real deal when it comes to finding the best herbal sleeping pill.
What Are the Best Herbal Sleeping Pill Ingredients?
The best and most effective herbal sleeping pill formulas have a combination have different ingredients. When a remedy contains more than one ingredient, it means that the herbal sleeping pill you are taking is attacking your sleep problems from more than one angle. Approaching a problem from multiple angles is an effective problem-solving strategy – just ask your nearest scientist! But if you don’t have any time to ask nearby scientists, then take a look at our summary of the most effective herbal sleeping pill ingredients. Let’s start with the most obvious one: melatonin.
Melatonin
Melatonin is a hormone. Specifically, scientists often refer to it as the “sleep hormone”. It earned this nickname because it has a very specific sedative effect and plays a very important role in the human sleep cycle. When your eyes perceive that you are surrounded by darkness or low-level light, your optic nerve sends a signal to your pituitary gland to start releasing melatonin. This, in turn, triggers a positive feedback loop of hormones that come together in order to make you feel sleepy and ready for bed.
Unfortunately, this has been happening less and less in modern society. Some people don’t produce enough melatonin for genetic reasons. Some people don’t produce enough melatonin because their stress levels are too high. Others are suffering from melatonin deficiencies because they’re constantly staring at their phones, their high definition TV, or a brightly-lit computer screen. These sources of electronic light are notorious for emitting the blue light that your eyeballs mistake for sunshine. This blue light tricks your eyes and your brain into thinking it is still daytime. If your body thinks it’s still daytime, it’s not going to prepare itself for sleep. So in addition to taking an herbal sleeping pill with melatonin in it, you should try to help your body out that much more by limiting blue light exposure in the evenings and getting more bright sunlight exposure during the day.
5-HTP
Let’s use a typical family as an analogy for the relationship between melatonin and 5-HTP. If melatonin is the big brother responsible for tucking everyone in at bedtime, 5-HTP is the little brother or sister who wants to stay up late and play dress-up. Despite how closely these two ingredients work together, they’re very different in nature. But they are both very important for your nightly rest.
Unlike melatonin, 5-HTP is not a hormone. It is an amino acid. But it is an amino acid which is used as a building block of hormones. When your body metabolizes food and supplements like herbal sleeping pills, it breaks down the 5-HTP into its most important components. It then recycles those components and uses them to build hormones like serotonin and melatonin. We obviously know why it’s good for your body to convert 5-HTP into melatonin. But what about serotonin?
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that neurological scientists closely associate with happiness. As a matter of fact, that’s the basic function of almost every single antidepressant medication out there: to boost serotonin levels in your brain. Whether you’re on an antidepressant or not, having too little serotonin in your system can make you feel stressed out all the time. And the more stressed you feel, the harder it will be for you to get to sleep at night. But if you take an herbal sleeping pill with 5-HTP in it, you’ll be able to help your body balance its levels of melatonin and serotonin for better quality rest.
Chamomile
Lots of people scoff at the idea of using an herbal sleeping pill to help with their sleep troubles. But chamomile is nothing to sneeze at. It’s more than just the most popular flavor of herbal tea next to lavender or lotus flower. It has potent sedative and anti-inflammatory effects which are so conclusively proven by science that German doctors can legally prescribe chamomile supplements as a prescription medication.
How is this so? For starters, chamomile contains a blend of terpenoids and flavonoids which most plants don’t have. It contains the flavonoid apigenin, which is one of the most well-proven organic flavonoids that the research world knows of today. It naturally binds to benzodiazepine receptors, mimicking the same anti-anxiety effect as a benzodiazepine drug without the side effects. This neurological process has the added benefit of increasing GABA levels in your brain. The more GABA you have free-floating between your neural synapses, the more calm and relaxed you feel. And the easier it is to get to sleep!
The Best Herbal Sleeping Pill Your Money Can Buy
We know of one herbal sleeping pill in particular which contains all of these ingredients and more to help you get some of the best sleep you’ll ever have. It’s called Avinol PM. In addition to melatonin, 5-HTP, and chamomile, its different formulations contain GABA, valerian root, orange peel, and passion flower, among many other things. You have the option of purchasing the extra strength formula in a tablet, or the original formula in a quick dissolve chew so that you don’t have to struggle with swallowing a pill. No other herbal sleeping pill gives you with many options with as effective ingredients as Avinol PM does.
Avinol PM 