I said I’d mention another herbal product I’d actually found useful - as opposed to the vast majority (that I’ve tried - still a tiny minority of all the concoctions you can find out there, but… where was I? oh yeah…).

It was called Hi Qi Restful Sleep.

You’re sleepin’ OK?   Move along then. Nothin’ to see here.  

Again (if you’ve read my other posts), it’s not a miracle, but my experience is that it helps.

I generally sleep pretty well, for me. I did have to qualify that, though. Y’know that guy thing, when you reach a certain age, and you get up in the middle of the night to pee? Well, I’m that age… and a bit. As any half-decent medical site will be only too happy to tell you, with pictures and arrows, no less, the prostate is an organ that’s important to male sexual and reproductive function. And it’s badly designed. I mean, really.  It’s a donut shaped thingie that encircles the urethra at the very top, right up against the bladder.

Let’s say that again. It’s a thick, fibrous ring of glandular stuff that basically strangles your pee-pipe, right at the source, and that’s at the _best_ of times. It spends the first half of your life producing seminal fluid, so that your sperm have something liquid to ride in, as they head for the exit. (Um, I’m talking to guys here, right?  Setting up the sleep thing. Women can skip a few paragraphs ahead… or keep reading for laughs.)

So, what else does this thing do. Lemme think, here.

Right. It reacts to years of exposure to male hormones by swelling. 

It starts life like a Montreal bagel (a slim, smooth ring) and then turns into one of those fat, overstuffed bready things that some other cities mistakenly think of as ‘bagels’ - the kind that are so puffed that there’s basically no hole in the center.  Got that image firmly in mind?  In youth and early adulthood, your prostate is a ring, and your urethra runs from your bladder through the hole in the center of the ring. Then, you pass 40-something and the damn thing swells and makes the hole tighter. And tighter. And tighter.

And pretty soon, it’s throttling your urethra - the tube by which urine goes from your bladder to the outside world.  Oh, and since it’s really an outgrowth of the urethra and the neck of the bladder, it’s not like it can slide up and down outside the tube. It stays put. It swells. And as it swells, the inside diameter shrinks (see above) and the outside diameter expands.  Where does it expand to? Well up against your bladder, of course. So, it’s putting constant pressure on the bladder, right about the place where the bladder lets you know it’s being stretched by a full load of urine. 

Yes, it makes you feel the urge to pee, more frequently and more urgently than “back in the day”, and then it tries to prevent the passage of urine through the only tube to the outside world. Cruel. If there was a god, I’d blame her/him/it for a cruel joke on all us human males. What’s even more cruel is that a minority of men live a good long life without their prostates ever becoming problematic… but I digress from my digression…

All of that to say that, as guys get older, we generally start feeling the urge halfway through the night. There’s not a tremendous amount you can do about that, but THIS particular post is about what happens after you stumble back to bed. 

You lie there waiting to go back to sleep. 

Usually you do - sleep, I mean - and the next thing you know it’s morning.

Same with the women. Either they’ve got their own reason to wake up, or the hubby climbing out of bed and bumping into things on the way to the bathroom is enough to wake the wife too. Mostly it’s just a half-awake experience, then shut-eye until morning. No big deal for either of you.

But sometimes, the ceiling stays stubbornly in view. Or, you resolutely keep your eyes closed, but the images behind your eyelids are not dreams; rather they’re things you’ve been fretting about. Or worse, they’re meaning-of-life questions, but something about the 03:00 timeframe causes your answers to be bleak and pitiless. So you toss. You turn. You remember your most embarrassing moments, you fret and fume about how little you’ve made of your life, and how much it’s slipped by, already. You admit that your feeling of it being “half over already” is actually optimistic, and you’d have to count on living past 110 for this to be “half-way”.  Argh! And the radio-alarm comes on and you haven’t slept in hours… or worse, you finally fell asleep mere minutes before the alarm sounds, so you are at that point where waking is disorienting, unsatisfying and all-round not a happy experience. And the day is just officially beginning.

Hey! All that from getting up to pee.

It’s _those_ nights that you’d like to be able to simply pop a pill or something and let the fretting subside and let sleep come while you’ve still got hours before sunrise (I’m writing this in December, so four in the morning is still 3-1/2 hours before sun-up).  But pretty-much any pill (or liquid) that you can get from the pharmacy is going to have nasty side-effects. Or it’ll be addictive. Or it’ll work for a while, then need higher, ever-higher doses to keep working.

What you want is calmness. You want anxiety or racing thoughts to subside. You want tense muscles to unclench. You don’t want something to knock you out. If nothing else, you’d be useless in case of some nighttime emergency - like a fire, or the kids getting sick, or whatever. Calm is good. Doped-up, knocked-out is not.

This is where Hi Qi Restful Sleep comes in. 

It’s gentle, reasonably effective, and seemingly lacking in side-effects.

You don’t take it every night. You take it on those nights where you’ve had a rough day, maybe some extra anxiety about the job, or about not making a deadline, or maybe a big scary presentation coming up. Perhaps your house is now worth less than your mortgage. Ouch! Or a close relative (parent? sibling? child?) is due to undergo major surgery. 

Personally, I find that if I take a couple of the “Restful Sleep” capsules plus one of Valerian, I sleep like a baby. I can still awaken to empty my bladder in the middle of the night, but as soon as my head hits the pillow again, I’m back to sleep.  

No grogginess. No adverse effects on my health or mental state the next day. I awaken rested.

In fact, it doesn’t make me drowsy at all. Just calm and _able_ to sleep if/when I’m tired. 

In other words, I can take it during the day if I’m feeling, oh… perhaps… maybe… a little… E D G Y ! 

It doesn’t work as well, for that purpose as another herb I once used, but that other herb, kava-kava, got itself banned in Canada after a few idiots damaged their livers by taking way too much, and our idiot government overreacted. Now they’re too embarrassed to admit their error so they are stupidly and stubbornly clinging to the ban. Well maybe not so stupidly, if the rumors are true that certain government officials were paid by certain pharmaceutical companies to keep the un-patent-able kava-kava off the market. 

Where were we?  Well, if you can get kava-kava root extract (not stems or leaves), and your government doesn’t hassle you about it, then it’s great for occasional day-time anxiety relief (FAR better than a shot of alcohol before you give the best-man speech at your buddy’s wedding, or the deal-of-a-lifetime-clinching presentation in front of the big customer). It’s also just about as good as the product I’m describing (Hi Qi Restful Sleep capsules from PharmEast).  But if you have any problem _getting_ kava-kava, or if you have any undesirable reactions to it, then the Hi Qi caps are the way to go.

From my perspective, neither of these are for taking every day. They’re for occasional use when you need them. If you “need” them every darn day, then you have problems and should be investigating what’s really wrong with you. Almost everybody gets a bit strung out or flustered or stressed or anxious now-and-then. Those are the occasions when I’d take Hi Qi Restful Sleep or a good, reliable (known concentration of kavalactones) kava preparation.

By the way, while Hi Qi Restful Sleep contains some valerian, and valerian by itself is often recommended as a gentle herbal answer to non-specific agitation or tenseness, I find its affects, alone, to be just barely detectable at recommended dosage.  Everybody’s different. I’m reporting what’s worked for me. What’s worked for me is Hi Qi Restful Sleep plus a little extra valerian.

Again, the effect is not as spectacular as that of Holistrol (renamed as Hi Qi Healthy Blood Pressure) that I discuss in another post, but the herbal items that I discuss here are at least in the category of “seem to reliably do what they say they will, without fanfare or hype, and without any side-effects that I’ve noticed”.

Next time, I’ll get onto the third-and-last herbal thingie that I’ve found to be of any use or effectiveness, and it’s related to the story in this post. Stay tuned.

OH yeah.  I am aware that there are some stolid, unimaginative folks who never worry, never have trouble sleeping, are never nervous in tense work or social situations (like unpracticed public speaking). Yes, I know that you exist. I also tell myself that you pay for that stolidity, that placidity, with a lack of imagination and creativity.  I could be wrong, but it comforts me to think that creative people are often wound a little tighter, and that the two go hand-in-hand - a certain dynamic tension is necessary for creativity and imagination.  I don’t intend to be insulting here, and it doesn’t matter anyway, because those folks would not be reading this.

Carry on as though normal.

That’s the way I see it, anyway.

Copyright 2008