The best sleeping pills are the ones that work for you. The Lunesta sleeping pill, while it's the newest sleeping pill medication out on the market today, may not work for you, while taking kava and avoiding caffeine may completely cure your insomnia. Every person is a little different, and you'll need to experiment to figure out what works best for you.

Start by defining what your problem is. Do you have chronic sleeping problems, causing you sleepless nights at least four times a week, or do you have infrequent bouts with insomnia? Chronic problems require very different treatment. Infrequent bouts of insomnia can probably best be cured by taking a Benadryl and going to bed at a reasonable time.

Chronic insomnia is more likely to require regular sleeping tablets of some sort. If you've followed every piece of insomnia advice out there, from stopping smoking to starting to lose weight, you may still have to take a pill of some sort to help you sleep. Especially if your insomnia cure plan includes problems that take time to implement (weight loss being the most common), you may find that at least occasionally you'll need some help falling asleep.

Always start your insomnia treatment with natural sleeping pills, not with a prescription from the doctor. Simple natural sleep aids like kava, St. John's Wort, and valerian have been around for millennia, and your pharmacist can help you select one that will help you. Herbal sleeping pills are not designed to get you to sleep right away, however; most require you to take them for a while before they become fully effective, so you'll need to give them some time to work.

Over the counter sleeping pills generally are better for treating acute attacks of insomnia. They do put you to sleep rapidly, but you may have some problems. For instance, sleeping drugs that relax you too much may make sleep apnea worse. This sort of sleeping pill is also much more likely to lose effectiveness when used on a regular basis, so if you take it all the time in order to sleep you may find that your insomnia gets worse after a while.

Your final step is prescription sleeping tablets . These are not necessarily strong sleeping aids , but rather have an action on your brain that the other drugs do not. Prescription sleeping pills are more likely to be habit forming, and are more likely to have problematic side effects than other sleeping drugs you may have tried. Still, for many people the prescription medication is the only treatment that cures insomnia, and should at least be considered when all else fails.