RestEZ™ by Melaleuca

Sleep is so integral to our experience as a human that a lack of it produces many negative side effects like an inability to concentrate, impaired memory, mood swings, poor motor coordination, and an impaired immune system. According to The National Institutes of Health, as many as 60 million Americans suffer from insomnia frequently or for extended periods of time each year. Insomnia tends to affect about 40 percent of women and 30 percent of men, and the older we get, the more frequently insomnia is reported.(1)(2)

Restful sleep contributes to quality of life, as studies on sleep deprivation show. Normal sleep needs for adults range from 5 to 10 hours, depending on the person, but on average, between 7 to 8 hours are needed nightly. Clues that you are not getting enough sleep are daytime sleepiness, taking less than five minutes to fall asleep, and taking ‘microsleep’ naps during the day-often without knowing you’ve fallen asleep.(3) Prolonged sleep loss could reduce the body's ability to regulate hormones that control hunger, possibly resulting in an increased appetite and a preference for high-carbohydrate foods.(4)

Doctors often prescribe a class of drugs called benzodiazepines for insomnia, an inability to fall asleep or to stay asleep.(5) The benzodiazepines are minor tranquilizers and they produce varying sedative, anti-anxiety and muscle relaxant results.(6) There are common side effects to taking these medications, such as dizziness, confusion, impaired judgment and upset stomach the day after using the medicine. A more serious problem, however, is the potential addictive nature of these drugs will disrupt quality of life for some users. Long term use of the benzodiazepine family of drugs usually leads to tolerance (where you need a higher dosage to achieve the same result) and/or dependence (where you feel withdrawal symptoms when you stop using the medication).(7)

Non-habit forming herbal preparations are a safer alternative to pharmaceutical sleep aids. Consider the main ingredients in Melaleuca’s RestEZ: valerian, hops, and passionflower. The differing sedative properties of each of these ingredients combine to help people who have problems falling asleep as well as those who cannot stay asleep. Since each person’s sleep cycles are different, it may take up to three weeks of continued use for herbal preparations like RestEZ to gradually affect your sleep over time.

Valerian
The use of valerian as a medicinal herb has been traced to Hippocrates from ancient Greece. It has long been used as a sedative in folk medicine, however the academic studies on its mechanism of action seem to be inconclusive because of too much conflicting data due to small sample sizes.

A common method researchers use to assess the efficacy of valerian is to ask for volunteers to take either a placebo or valerian preparation before bedtime in their home. Then upon awakening, they are to fill out a questionnaire on the quality of their sleep. The results are called "subjective sleep." Volunteers in the valerian group rate their sleep quality improved between 10% and 30% more than volunteers who took placebo. Better sleep quality includes taking less time to fall asleep, and waking up less often in the night. One study that had volunteers sleep in a sleep lab used a polysomnograph machine to make recordings of their sleep cycles. Researchers found valerian to be effective because it diminished the time of stages 1 and 2 in non-REM sleep while it increased delta sleep, the deep sleep stage.(8)

A hypothesis on the mechanism of action for valerian involves studying cellular receptor sites. During the day, a chemical called adenosine builds up in our blood, and after time, it causes drowsiness.(9) A 2002 study in Life Sciences found that valerian extract can fit in the cellular receptors for adenosine, and offered a hypothesis that because valerian extract partially mimics the action of adenosine, it can function as a sedative.(10)

Common side effects to pharmaceutical sleep aids include grogginess, impaired motor ability, and impaired memory. With valerian, however, reaction time, alertness, and concentration are not negatively impacted the morning after ingestion.(11)

Hops
Hops has been used as a folk remedy for restlessness, anxiety, and sleep disorders, however studies are inconclusive as to whether it works as an independent sedative, or as a synergist with another sedative ingredient. The published studies on hops tend to test it in combination with valerian, though a German study from 2006 found that hops alone does initiate a central sedating effect.(12) An interesting side note is that the use of hops as a sedative is attributed to the observation of european hops-pickers getting sleepy!(13)

Hops and Valerian Together
When two agents with similar properties are combined together, they can help each other to produce a stronger/better effect than either can alone. Each element is known in medical terms as a synergist. A 2007 Swiss study deduced that since valerian acts like adenosine and hops acts like melatonin (a hormone that plays a role in sleep), the combination of the two is more beneficial than either alone.(14)

An exciting development in sleep research has been in finding out how caffeine keeps people awake. Research has found that caffeine fits into the adenosine cellular receptors, but produces no action, thereby effectively blocking the receptor site and inhibiting sleep. Because of this, caffeine is called an antagonist. When volunteers took caffeine, and then later took a combination of valerian and hops, the arousal induced by caffeine was reduced or reversed, depending on the valerian/hops dose.(15) This confirms the hypothesis that valerian and/or valerian/hops act as a partial agonist at the adenosine receptor. Valerian and hops together can mimic the action of adenosine and reverse the action of caffeine.

Passionflower
Passionflower has also been used for centuries in folk medicine to treat many conditions. In regards to its use as a sedative and sleep aid, passionflower has been endorsed by several important European research organizations. It has been approved by Commission E for over fifteen years for the treatment of nervous unrest, and The European Scientific Cooperative on Phytotherapy has approved the herb for use in people who experience tension, restlessness, and insomnia associated with irritability.(16)

Passionflower is an anti-anxiety ingredient, so it does not necessarily help in falling asleep faster. It improves the quality of rest. In 2001, a small scale double-blind randomized trial on passionflower was published, and the results were outstanding, warranting further large scale studies. Two groups of 18 patients diagnosed with general anxiety disorder were given either passionflower extract drops plus a placebo tablet, or placebo drops plus oxazepam tablets (a benzodiazepine tranquilizer).  The scientists found that the oxazepam started working faster than passionflower, but there was no significant difference between the two test groups by the end of the four week trial. So the herbal and the chemical treated the anxiety condition the same, however the patients taking the chemical suffered from side effects, and the passionflower group did not.(17)

It May Not Be Insomnia
If natural sleep aids do not help improve the quality of your sleep after about three weeks of continuous use, consider seeing your doctor. There is another condition completely different from insomnia that also may cause one to wake many times in the night, and to rise unrefreshed in the morning. It is sleep apnea, a condition in which breathing stops and starts during sleep. With this condition, the brain may get insufficient oxygen during sleep, since the breathing passages are blocked. See your doctor for a diagnosis, because sleep apnea is treatable with a special machine.(18)

Conclusion
Valerian, hops, and passionflower are a great combination of natural herbs for relieving the stresses of the day and promoting restful sleep without the negative side effects so common with pharmaceutical sleep aids.

1. Brain Basics: Understanding Sleep. Insomnia. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

2. Good Health Rests On A Good Night's Sleep AARP

3. Brain Basics: Understanding Sleep. How Much Sleep Do We Need? National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

4. Good health rests on a good night's sleep The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC/Radio Canada) In Depth Health, June 11, 2007

5. Resource for Sleep Disorders. Medline Plus, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

6. Benzodiazepine. Wikipedia.

7. Medications. Sleep Education.com, from American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

8. Polysomnographic Evaluation of the Hypnotic Effect of Valeriana edulis Standardized Extract in Patients Suffering from Insomnia Planta Med 2001; 67: 695-699.

9. Insomnia. MedicineNet.com.

10. Interactions of valerian extracts and a fixed valerian-hop extract combination with adenosine receptors Life Sciences. Volume 71, Issue 16, 6 September 2002, Pages 1939-1949.

11. The influence of valerian treatment on "reaction time, alertness and concentration" in volunteers. Pharmacopsychiatry. 1999 Nov;32(6):235-41.

12. Sedating effects of Humulus lupulus L. extracts. Phytomedicine Volume 13, Issue 8, 11 September 2006, Pages 535-541.

13. Humulus Lupus Monograph. 69K. Alternative Medicine Review vol 8 num 2, 2003. Thorne Research.

14. Scientific Evidence for a Fixed Extract Combination from Valerian and Hops traditionally used as a Sleep-inducing Aid. WMW Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift. Volume 157, Numbers 13-14 / July, 2007.

15. The Fixed Combination of Valerian and Hops (Ze91019) acts via a Central Adenosine Mechanism Planta Med 2004; 70: 594-597

16. Passionflower by Greg Annussek, Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine.

17. Passionflower in the treatment of generalized anxiety: a pilot double-blind randomized controlled trial with oxazepam Journal of Clinical Pharmacy and Therapeutics, October 2001, vol 26 (5), 363–367.

18. Sleep Apnia Medline Plus, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

I would love to know what you think about this report. You may contact us with any suggestions or comments about this report.

Jessica Alvarez

December 2007