clonidine for insomnia?

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my doctor put me on clonidine (a medication that lowers your blood pressure) for insomnia?? did anybody ever hear of such a thing? how will a blood pressure medication help me fall asleep?

http://www.rxlist.com/catapres-drug.htm
http://www.minddisorders.com/Br-Del/Clonidine.html

Seems like it probably reduces your sympathetic nervous system's base level, so your "alert level" decreases. The doctor's basically using it for its side effects, which include drowsiness... kind of the way a doctor will prescribe allergy medicine (antihistamines) as a mild sleep aid, because the side-effect of drowsiness is so common with those.

This is what's called an, "off label" use of a drug. While the drug is primarily designed for one function, it has a beneficial side effect that can be used to treat other disorders, without creating other problems.

Specific sleep medications often carry significant risk of dependency. If you insomnia can be combatted with a nudge from the off-label use of a non-habit forming drug, it is much better for you in the long run.

I take a lot of Clonidine for my morbid hypertension, and .2 mg or more in one dose can sometimes make me drowsy. If you are only going to be taking it once per day, it might do just fine for you. However, Clonidine can also cause dry mouth and constipation. The good thing about Clonidine, however, is that it is not going to cause you any actual harm. Virtually anybody can take it quite safely.

I was on a blood pressure medication for anxiety for awhile.. I don't think it really helped much.

Benadryl is, always has been, and probably always will be the strongest, most sure-fire sleeping pill.
For milder insomnia, better to go with herbal tea (like the sleepytime teas with some combination of chamomile and Valerian,) melatonin, and/or anything with tryptophan in it. (turkey and warm milk are both good for tryptophan. I guess cold milk would be too.. The warmness is probably more a relaxation thing.)

Drugs are just chemicals and what they do doesn't necessarily cleanly map to functions like sleep, blood pressure, pain relief, etc. They all basically do a bunch of things at once, just one or two or three those things more strongly than the others.

Ie Amantadine was originally used to treat influenza, but is now more commonly used to treat Parkinson's disease.
Neurontin was developed as an adjunct to anti-seizure meds, but also works really well at treating neuropathic pain.
MAOI drugs were originally used to treat tuberculosis, but later were used as anti-depressants.

I was briefly on clonidine, and found it very sedating (which was not why I was taking it, so had to stop).

IIRC at least 50% of all prescriptions are written for "off label" use. The reason (I've heard) is because the FDA testing process for getting a drug approved is hugely expensive, so the drug companies only want to do it once for each drug -- since they know doctors can prescribe it for other reasons later, as they are discovered, without further FDA approval.