How do sleeping pills work?
In: Biology
Well there are many many different types of medications that can be classified as sleeping pills, and they all can work in very different ways. But, I’ll go over the types of drugs that people typically think of when they talk about sleeping pills:
The most common over the counter one you would find is Diphenhydramine, which is a very fancy way of saying Benadryl. It’s an antihistamine, and antihistamines bind to Histamine-1 receptors and block your body from using them. Though it’s not perfectly understood on a neurochemical level why this causes drowsiness, the general idea is that it basically reduces the frequency of certain signals in the brain resulting in a sedative effect.
As for prescribed medications, the common drug type used are benzodiazepines, such as Lorazepam (Ativan) or Diazepam (Valium). These work by activating a naturally occurring inhibitory neurotransmitter called GABA. GABA will attach to different receptors in the brain and prevent them from sending electric signals in a much stronger fashion than diphenhydramine, resulting in a much stronger sedating effect.
The last class of drugs are benzodiazepine-like drugs, and the most common is Zolpidem, which is the fancy name for Ambien. Ambien is actually classified as a hypnotic drug, and it works in a very similar way to the benzodiazepines by increasing the activity of a naturally occurring sedative neurotransmitter in the brain called GABA. What makes this drug a hypnotic drug and different than the benzos, is that it causes GABA to activate a very specific type of receptor, which results in a very complex cascade of events in the brain that causes the electric signals to drastically slow in a way that causes sedation and hypnosis. This hypnotic effect is why you often hear stories about people doing crazy things while sleeping, like cooking food or driving their car while on Ambien.
That’s about as simple as I can put it. There’s tons of other drugs out there for sleep but they mostly fall into one of these three categories.
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