Institute for Continuing Education

Medications that Interfere with Sleep

Course Objectives

Upon successful completion of this module, you will be able to:

• Medications that Interfere with Sleep—An Overview
• Identify the various side effects that medications that impact sleep.
• Identify ways to minimize the negative impact medications can have on sleep.

Course Information

Though medication and prescription drugs are designed to help with specific problems, they can often have negative side effects. Medicine can disrupt the normal balance of the body and lead to a disruption in sleep or insomnia. Even sleeping pills can have a negative impact on restful sleep.

Each person spends one third of his or her life asleep. It is not surprising that such a complex and pervasive cognitive state should be affected by drugs in many different ways. A philosophy that remains cogent for the CNS is that new research almost always shows this system to be more complex than previously thought. Only a few years ago, if patients complained of difficulty sleeping, they were given pills, often dangerous and addictive pills, to induce sleep no matter what the basis of the complaint might be. Sleeping pills may be safer now, and the understanding of the sleep state itself has increased rapidly. Diagnoses are still diffuse, however, and treatments are often poorly directed.