Over the Counter Sleep Aids for Less Than $5 or $10

If you want to find 5 or more good, over-the-counter sleeping aids for under $5 or $10, just walk into a convenient drugstore or supermarket and start reading labels and calculating prices. Growing up with a pharmacist dad, I learned how to read the labels on drugs to spot the active ingredient, where to look up what ingredient did what, and how to calculate the price per dose. Bring your eyeglasses, learn to read labels, and save money on over-the-counter sleeping aids or other medicines like I do.

The Four Key Ingredients in Over the Counter Sleep Aids

In the USA, there are a limited number of ingredients that can be sold without a prescription as a sleeping aid. The ingredients in the cheaper generic or store brand sleep aids and the heavily advertised, more expensive brand names are the same ingredients! Every sleeping aid box and bottle I checked in a large drugstore had one or two of these four active ingredients:

* Diphenhydramine, diphenhydramine HCL, diphenhydramine citrate: An antihistamine with the side effect of making you drowsy. This is often listed as "the sleep-aid ingredient doctors recommend most". That's true, because it's FDA approved, cheap, and reliable.

* Doxylamine or doxylamine succinate: Another antihistamine with the side effect of making you drowsy. This one dissolves better than diphenhydramine, so it is used in liquid sleep aids.

* Acetominophen: A common over the counter pain reliever used in some "sleeping aid + pain relief" formulas.

* Ibuprophen: A common over the counter pain reliever used in the rest of the "sleeping aid + pain relief" formulas.

The sleep remedies come in tablets, gel-caps, coated capsules, powders, or liquid. This affects the price because some are cheaper to manufacture or more popular. But, the price difference between brands is mostly because of the cost of marketing, branding, and advertising to convince you to buy their package instead of the other manufacturer's package.

Buying Tips for Cheaper OTC Sleep Aids

Buy plain sleep aids, not sleep aids combined with pain relief, cough relief or allergy relief. If you have pain and sleepiness, it's cheaper to take an acetominophen tablet from that big cheap bottle and a sleep aid from that other cheap bottle than to buy a special formula for sleep and pain relief. For pain, take "A", for sleeplessness, take "B", and for those nights when your workout left you sore and sleepless, take "A+B". It's one less bottle cluttering up your medicine cabinet.

Calculate the "unit price", or cost per dose, to see which box gives you the best deal. Usually the product with the most doses will have the lowest price per dose, but not always. Price in cents, divided by the number of doses (not tablets, because some labels say "take two") is the only way to figure out whether 20 tablets at $4.83 is a better deal than 24 tablets at $5.79.

Examples of Sleeping Aid Price Comparisons:

The prices are from Walgreens.com, using their store brand, but prices at any store will be similar. The variety makes it difficult to make meaningful price comparisons, but this gives you an example of what label reading can save you. Although either product would make you sleepy, you can save as much as 50% oper dose

Plain Sleeping Aids, all contain Diphenhydramine:

Unisom SleepGels Maximum Strength Nighttime Sleep-Aid, $4.99 for 8 gel-caps ($0.65/dose)

Walgreens Wal-Som Maximum Strength Nighttime Sleep Aid, $7.99 for 32 gel-caps ($0.25/dose)

Simply Sleep Nighttime Sleep Aid 25 mg, $5.49 for 24 capsules ($0.23/dose)

Walgreens Nighttime Sleep Aid 25 mg, $3.99 for 24 capsules ($0.17/dose)

Walgreens Nighttime Sleep Aid 25 mg, $9.99 for 100 capsules ($0.10/dose) (a good example of buying in bulk and saving money)

Pain Relieving Sleeping Aids, all contain Diphenhydramine:

Advil PM Pain Reliever / Nighttime Sleep-Aid, $4.99 for 20 coated capsules ($0.25/dose)

Walgreens PM Extra Strength Pain Reliever / Sleep Aid, $3.49 for 20 ($0.17/dose)

Precautions For Using Over the Counter Sleep Aids

You are taking these to make you sleepy. Lie down and take a nap, don't drive, juggle chainsaws, or try to think.

The antihistamine will increase the drowsy-making effects of anything else you consume, such as alcohol, tranquilizers, and prescription pain relievers. If you are taking an over the counter sleeping aid with any of the above, be careful to avoid anything that requires fast reflexes or decision making.