A lot of people ask me whether sleep restriction — making sure that the amount of time allotted
for sleep is close to your current average nightly sleep duration — can help if the
main challenge is waking during the night and finding it hard to fall back to sleep,
rather than difficulty falling asleep at the start of the night.
The answer to this question is yes — and that’s 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.
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Sleep restriction is often one of the first evidence-based techniques someone with chronic
insomnia will learn about.
Although the language isn’t very helpful since sleep restriction implies we are restricting
sleep when — in fact — we are instead restricting wakefulness, it can be a really
helpful technique to implement when starting the journey toward a lifetime of better sleep.
The technique is helpful because it helps address a common behavior that perpetuates
sleep disruption — spending too much time in bed.
So, for example, if you are currently averaging five hours of sleep, instead of spending eight
hours in bed because your goal is eight hours of sleep, you might get started by spending
around five-and-a-half hours in bed instead.
This gives you the opportunity to get a bit more sleep than you usually get while reducing
the amount of time available for nighttime wakefulness.
Allotting a more appropriate amount of time for sleep also helps build sleep drive — the
urge or drive to sleep the gets stronger the longer we remain awake.
For this reason, many clients think this technique would only be helpful if the challenge is
falling asleep at the start of the night since the simple act of going to bed later can help
build sleep pressure and make falling asleep a bit easier.
Sleep restriction, however, is helpful for chronic insomnia in all its forms — and
that’s because it helps tackle the three factors that perpetuate sleep disruption:
low sleep drive, body clock disruption, and arousal.
Most logically, perhaps, we can recognize that allotting less time for sleep will mean
more time spent awake — and that will build sleep drive.
Sleep drive can really help with falling asleep at the start of the night, but a strong sleep
drive can also help with nighttime awakenings — especially when they occur earlier in
the night — since if we are still really sleepy when we wake, it can make falling back
to sleep a lot easier.
Implementing sleep restriction by observing a consistent and appropriate sleep window
can help strengthen the body clock, too.
Since your sleep window ends at the same time each day, you give your body a consistent
morning anchor and this helps it better regulate sleep and wakefulness.
If we get out of bed at wildly different times each day, our body clock can struggle to regulate
itself – it might end up sending wake signals through the body when we want to be asleep
(for example, during the night!) and allowing sleep signals to take over when we want to
be awake.
Finally, sleep restriction can help address arousal since — by default — it provides
us with less opportunity for extended periods of nighttime wakefulness (because we are allotting
less time for sleep).
As a result, we help tackle conditioned arousal by creating a stronger association between
the bed and sleep (rather than unpleasant wakefulness) and we help tackle cognitive
arousal (the sleep-related thoughts and worries that might be making sleep more difficult)
since there’s less time available for the mental rumination that might be happening
at night.
Furthermore, as we start to spend less time awake during the night, we usually experience
better sleep quality and this can lead to less sleep-related worry.
Although there are more techniques that can help address the thoughts and behaviors that
perpetuate sleep disruption (for example, we can further strengthen the body clock and
lower arousal by being active and engaged in daytime activities and avoiding the temptation
to cancel plans or modify our days), sleep restriction can be a great starting point
— and it can be helpful regardless of whether your challenge is falling asleep at the start
of the night, or waking during the night and finding it hard to fall back to sleep.
So I hope you found this short video helpful.
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I do try to share a new sleep snippet video 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!