ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 6, 1996 TAG: 9602060043
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Beth Macy
SOURCE: BETH MACY
I think people can be broken down into two basic categories: those to whom sleep comes easily, and those who thrash. If you've ever spent half the night counting sheep while your spouse snores lumplike beside you, you know the drill:
You thrash for a while, then turn on the light and read. Eventually you feel sleepy so you turn the light off again... only to thrash some more.
Finally, you head downstairs to the couch, where at least your dog's snores aren't quite as loud.
An hour or two later, your husband wakes you up with, ``Good morning!'' Clueless and cheerful, he reminds you of those maddening Up With People singers you listened to in sixth-grade chorus.
You think dark, evil thoughts and trudge back into bed. Twenty minutes later, your toddler wakes you up from the next room.
When you go to lift him out of bed, he says, ``Good morning!''
And so I was intrigued by the news of melatonin, the new natural sleep aid. Though long-term research on the product has not been completed, melatonin advocates claim it relieves insomnia, reduces aging, prevents jet lag and boosts immunities.
Even my mother - a lifelong cynic, if ever there was one - has chosen melatonin as her nighttime tonic. (She has also, at age 68, become a Deadhead, making bootleg tapes and buying Jerry Garcia ties. But that's another story.)
``Older people don't sleep well,'' she said. ``But the first night we took it, we slept like logs.
``We think we're getting younger,'' she added, only half-joking. ``My hair seems to be getting darker again.''
My friend Bob, who's an even worse insomniac than I am, tried the hormone capsule recently, with limited results.
``He was sleeping like a baby at first, but his insomnia burst through the veil of melatonin at 4 a.m.,'' his wife reported. He's gone back to thrashing, drug-free.
Marketed as a supplement, melatonin is selling like so many herbs in area health-food stores. ``We sell about 24 cases a week,'' said Nancy Duffy of Nature's Outlet in Salem.
Dennis Rea, the owner of four area Nature's Outlet stores, says the late-shift workers who frequent his Martinsville store find it particularly useful for aiding sleep. And his wife, Cheryl Rea, claims that it has cured that insomnia that began as a symptom of menopause five years ago.
``I used to wake up at 2 a.m. and roam the house from 2 to 6. I can tell you every TV show that's on in the middle of the night,'' she said. ``It's been incredibly beneficial for me.''
For Jean Thomas, a Roanoke real-estate agent, melatonin helps break the frenetic pace of a day's work. ``Being in sales, you go constantly,'' she says. ``It's a high-stress job. And then when you finally do lay down at night, you think about everything you've done or said all day long.
``Melatonin helps you go to sleep and not wake up in the middle of the night. Of course it may just be a placebo effect.''
Once further studies are complete, it also may prove too good to be true. Elizabeth Good, the vitamin buyer for the Roanoke Natural Foods Co-op, tells customers not to rely on melatonin every night as a preventive for insomnia - only when they're already having trouble sleeping.
She's wary of recommending a product that hasn't been well-researched, noting that Canada and England pulled melatonin off the shelves for further testing.
It amazes her that 40 percent to 80 percent of adults have periodic trouble falling asleep. ``It seems ridiculous, but not when you think about what a high-stress society we have,'' she adds.
``Our society is so geared toward, `I'm feeling this way; I need a pill' - instead of looking at making changes in their lifestyles to get rid of the stress.''
And so the good news, fellow thrashers, is we're not the only ones who get to see the clock radio flash at 3:17 a.m.
For the record, I tried melatonin a few nights last week. And I slept like a baby...an extremely colicky one.
I dreamt of being operated on - in places you don't want to be operated on - by some of the characters on ``The Young & The Restless.'' I woke up every 30 minutes, alternately sweaty and freezing cold.
The even better news is that the melatonin experience exhausted me so much, I'm now sleeping well, like my husband.
Who, by the way, has embarked on a sleeping experiment of his own. For the past two nights, he's worn Breathe Right, those trendy nasal strips football players wear to help them breathe and wives buy to quiet their husbands' snores.
I was too busy sleeping to tell if they worked or not, snoring-wise.
But I do remember laughing for a good five minutes before nodding off. With that strippy thing glued to his nose, my husband looked like ``The Revenge of the Nerds Meets the Plastic Surgeon.''
Proving an age-old theory: that laughter may be the best medicine of all.
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Robert Lunsford. color.by CNB