Sleep Enough

After my experience with kava herb as I mentioned in a previous post, I was a little skeptical of all these sleeping herbs, and whether they work or not. So, I didn’t bother taking sleeping herbs for a long time – around 5 years. During that period, I’ve underwent various phases of insomnia that were only relieved by the occasional sleep medication. However, I’m not in favor of using sleep medications and I won’t recommend that to anyone unless you have (really) severe insomnia. Today, I want to talk about valerian.

Valerian is a herb like kava. But in my opinion, valerian is much better than kava in terms of performance and efficacy. It’s not as good as a pure sleeping pill of course, but if you want a natural solution to insomnia, you really should try valerian.

It seems to be the best of the sleeping herbs that I’ve tried before, and I’ve tried oatstraw, hops, and kava to date. I’ll probably try out St John’s wort one of these days. But valerian, in my experience, has the best “sleep effect” to date. With melatonin, it works even better.

Take valerian and melatonin just before sleeping, and see if it puts you to sleep. It doesn’t work all the time though, I must add, but it works about 80-90% of the time. Meaning out of 10 nights, it works 8 or 9 nights out of the 10. That’s good enough for me, right now.

Of course, with chronic or on-off insomnia, don’t expect valerian to be a miracle worker. I have to digress with some sites or books that claim valerian is an effective sleep promoter. It is ok, but just that – ok. As a natural (not pharmaceutical med) herb, valerian works well enough to replace sleeping pills when you’re not undergoing a serious phase of insomnia.

Valerian is said to decrease the number of nighttime awakenings and improve sleep quality. From my experience, it seems to have these qualities, as I find I can sleep one whole stretch for 7-8 hours now. But that is provided I sleep late, like 3 AM. If I sleep earlier, I find valerian does not MAKE me fall asleep so readily. So, it looks like I have to slowly adjust my circadian rhythm, because I have been sleeping at 2-3 AM all this while. Well, basically I’m a night owl.

If you want to know the dosage I’m taking, it is 2 capsules each time, at 110 mg standardized valerian extract (Radix Valeriana Officinalis) per capsule, and I often take it with 3 mg of melatonin. After more than 4 months of taking valerian, I feel certain enough to write this valerian review, but I’ll certainly post more of my findings in future, (including some facts and info about valerian).

And sometimes, changing brands makes a difference.