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Catching a good 8 hours of sleep at night is important because a disturbed sleep at night ruins the whole of the next day with fatigue.

However, even with medical aids to catch good sleep, people often end up with disrupted sleep throughout the night and end up getting the same result, with or without sleeping pills.

In her book "Master Your Sleep," Dr. Tracey Marks, psychiatrist with Stress Management Treatment of Atlanta, reveals facts of not only how and why we sleep, but also about the potential causes of sleep disruption.

"The ideal sleeping pill is one that puts you to sleep very quickly, lets you sleep all the way through the night, and then lets you wake up refreshed and ready to go," Marks said. "There are some that get close, but there is really no perfect sleeping pill."

She says that while sleeping pills can help induce sleep, it may also have certain negative effects on sleep that result in the disruption in sleep during the night.

"They can lengthen the amount of REM sleep that you have. And actually sometimes that can have an effect on depression," Marks said.

Marks also said that sleeping pills might completely become ineffective over time and stop working for people.

"Usually it's self-limiting because they'll just stop working, and you'll build up a tolerance," Marks said.

An alternative to sleeping pills is melatonin, a natural sleep remedy - and even teenagers can use it, she suggests according to Fox News.

"Melatonin can be very effective for not only helping people fall asleep, some of them, or some formulations...but also regulating sleep," Marks said. "For people who travel and they come back jet lagged, it can help reset you back into a normal sleeping pattern, which is very important."

Explaining why more and more Americans fail to catch a peaceful night of sleep, she explained it can be blamed on the technology people surround themselves with.  "Unfortunately, we create an environment that makes it harder for them to go against what's going on internally," Marks said. "Just their habits keep them up late at night."