I take 1000 mg of Valerian Root at night and 3 mg of melatonin. Most nights, that will suffice to get me to drift off to sleep at some point.

As a back-up, I have script for Zolpidem (generic Ambien) which my doc doles out stingily. A half a pill (which amounts to 2.5 mg) is enough to knock me out.

I will say, however, that "Ambien sleep" is not a good sleep to me. It's better than no sleep, but it's not as good as regular sleep. I can feel the difference.

This past Thursday night, I resorted the Zolpidem as I had to get up unusually early, and I wasn't feeling the sleep coming on. Despite getting about 6 hours of Ambien sleep, I still felt tired the next day. I had the worst flare of symptoms I've had in a long time. I went to bed that night covered in espom salt lotion and lidocaine patches. I felt 100% better yesterday after sleeping well.

Obviously getting good sleep is better for the body all around, but I'm going to be watching to see if my bad flares can be correlated with tiredness. That would be one vicious circle....you can't sleep because you're in too much pain, and not sleeping makes your pain worse.