If you’ve ever tried implementing evidence-based cognitive and behavioral techniques to help
address the thoughts and behaviors that perpetuate insomnia (or thought about giving them a try!)
but found it all quite overwhelming, you aren’t alone — and this is what I’m going to
be talking about in today’s video.
Hi, I'm Martin Reed.
If you have insomnia, I offer sleep coaching programs that will give you all the skills
and support you need to enjoy better sleep for the rest of your life.
You can learn more at insomniacoach.com
Now ultimately, the best way to improve sleep if you’re living with chronic insomnia is
to implement behaviors that help set the stage for sleep.
That’s because we can’t actually control sleep — we can’t make ourselves fall asleep
on command, and we can’t force ourselves to get a certain amount of sleep.
In fact, trying to control sleep is something that actually makes sleep more difficult because
sleep efforts generate arousal.
So, by implementing evidence-based cognitive and behavioral techniques, we’re focusing
our efforts in a far more constructive way.
We’re doing things like allotting an appropriate amount of time for sleep, getting out of bed
when being in bed doesn’t feel good, identifying, evaluating, and even challenging sleep-related
thoughts and beliefs that might be inaccurate or generating worry, and we’re implementing
techniques that reduce arousal and promote relaxation.
These techniques help to build sleep drive, strengthen the body clock, and reduce arousal.
In effect, they help set the stage for sleep and they help eliminate the thoughts and behaviors
that often disrupt sleep.
Now, if you’ve been living with insomnia for a long time (or are just a very enthusiastic
person!) you might be tempted to implement every single technique right away.
Although it’s completely understandable why you’d be keen to do this, it can make
things a lot more challenging because although the techniques are relatively straightforward,
they can be challenging to implement — especially in the short-term.
So, it can be helpful to take a more gradual approach.
For example, if you find that it takes a long time to fall asleep, or you spend a lot of
time awake at night, you might start with just one technique — allotting less time
for sleep.
You might go to bed later and/or get out of bed earlier.
It can be helpful to avoid allotting half-an-hour to an hour more for sleep than how much sleep
you tend to get from night to night (while, at the same time, making sure you still give
yourself the opportunity for a minimum amount of sleep — so, for example, I wouldn’t
suggest allotting less than five to five-and-a-half hours for sleep each night).
You can then use this to create a sleep window with an earliest possible bedtime and a consistent
final out of bed time.
Now, if you stick with just this one technique until you start to notice some positive improvements
— in this example, this might include a much stronger sense of sleepiness as bedtime
approaches, it might mean falling asleep faster, it might mean spending less time awake at
night, it might be all of these — if you can do that, and when you start to notice
positive improvements and can recognize that you’re making progress, you might then decide
to add additional techniques to improve sleep for the longer-term.
Things like getting out of bed when being in bed doesn’t feel good, for example.
By implementing proven, evidence-based techniques gradually, over time, you might find the process
a bit easier since you can become more comfortable with each technique, get some early wins,
and build some sleep confidence before implementing additional techniques.
Just as we can experience professional burnout if our workload is too much, we can experienced
heightened stress and find it hard to continue moving forward if we try to implement too
many techniques to improve our sleep, all at once.
So start slow, focus on the process rather than constantly monitoring for results, move
forward at your own pace, and you might find it a bit easier to implement and commit to
techniques that will help improve your sleep for the rest of your life.
So I hope you found this short video helpful.
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I do try to share some new sleep snippet videos every week.
If you have any questions, comments, feedback, or suggestions for a future video, please
leave a comment below or you can email me directly.
My email address is hello@insomniacoach.com.
Thanks for watching, and — as always — I'd like to leave you with this important reminder.
You can sleep!