Sales of non-prescription sleep aids are increasing

More than one in three Swedes state that they have trouble sleeping and the market for non-prescription sleep aids is booming. According to the two largest pharma companies in Sweden, Apoteket AB and Apotek Hjärtat, sales of non-prescription sleep aids increased by 10 percent last year compared to 2018. Globally, the sleep industry was expected to reach a value of $ 76 billion last year.

But according to Torbjörn Åkerstedt, professor emeritus at the Stress Research Institute, almost no prescription sleep aids are scientifically evaluated and if we feel that they help, it is often about a placebo effect.

- Neither apps nor gravity blankets have been evaluated. None of the herbal remedies are evaluated in a way that you can base recommendations on, but you believe it usually has a certain effect and you should not ignore that effect.

The public health authority's statistics show that 39 per cent of Swedes find it difficult to sleep. But the number of patients with severe sleep disorders leading to the diagnosis of insomnia has not increased in recent decades, but is about 10 percent of the population, says Torbjörn Åkerstedt.

- But there are more and more complaints outside this group and it is almost always related to stress and working hours.

However, our pursuit of the perfect sleep can be meaningless. It varies from person to person and everything between five and nine hours in a day is normal. In addition, we can wake up much more often during the night than we think, and still get a good sleep. In order to take damage from nightly awakening, you need to wake up as often as every two minutes. But if you feel that you are tired, irritated or not working during the day, then it will be time to seek help, says Torbjörn Åkerstedt.

Agneta Markström, a doctor at the sleep examination reception at the Uppsala Academic Hospital, meets patients who are just worried that they often wake up or because they have insomnia, ie lack of deep sleep. But investigations show that most people have deep sleep, even if they sleep briefly.

She says that we become more and more aware of how sleep affects us. This in turn leads to concerns that we do not have what we perceive as the optimal sleep, even though most of us do not really have problems.

- All people sleep poorly one night. But we must also realize that we cannot rationalize sleep. We must sleep and in order to sleep well we must do all this that we already know. Eat better, move more and be out more.