Anti-sleep drug abuse and mental health consequences

During exam season, students want to be able to stay up late to study without feeling sleepy. Therefore, some of them even use anti-sleep pills and patches.

These anti-drowsiness drugs are easily found and purchased online, and contain ingredients such as ginseng, acanthopanax, schisandra, polyscias fruticosa, gynostemma pentaphyllum, glutamine, trimethylxanthin, and vitamins B1, B6, etc. Some types also contain ginkgo biloba extract, magnesium lactate, etc.

These drugs are advertised as helping to fight sleepiness and nervous tension, making you alert, clear-headed, healthy, and reducing fatigue; helping to increase physical strength and nerve cell activity; helping to enhance memory, increase concentration and mental work ability... The subjects that often use them are students who are stressed and tired during exam preparation; People who work and need to concentrate their intelligence and strength; People who work at night and need to stay up late: night security guards, drivers...

One thing to note is that most of these advertisements only state the uses of the drug without mentioning the possible side effects. This causes many people to carelessly buy the drug without knowing that it can be harmful to their health.

And the consequences…

Anti-sleep drugs are essentially drugs that increase alertness, prevent sleepiness, and help users achieve a state of immediate excitement. However, the abuse of stimulants, patches, or drugs to fight sleepiness will cause many disadvantages for the cardiovascular system, negatively affect health and mental health, and risk disrupting the body's biological rhythm. In the long term, it will cause drug dependence, memory loss, and paralyze the feeling of sleepiness.

Each person needs an average of 8 hours of sleep per day. Prolonged lack of sleep causes fatigue, muscle aches, sunken and blurred eyes. Lack of sleep will significantly reduce concentration and thinking, more seriously will cause tremors in the extremities, gradually causing memory disorders, even abnormal behavior and paranoia.

Thus, "suppressing" sleep with drugs or addictive stimulants is not beneficial for mental health. Even situations where it is necessary to use anti-sleep drugs (nerve stimulants) must be taken with a prescription from a psychiatrist.

According to Health & Life - nt