What Is Insomnia?
Insomnia refers to difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep, or waking up earlier than you would like (e.g., an hour before your alarm clock is set). Insomnia is one of the most common sleep problems people may experience and contributes to a diminished quality of life for thousands of people every year.
Treating Insomnia
To fix their insomnia symptoms, many people turn to medications, nutritional supplements, smart technologies, or expensive new mattresses, often without lasting success.
The good news is that behavioral sleep medicine researchers have developed a highly effective treatment for insomnia, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBT-I, that can cure people’s insomnia and help them from developing it again in the future.
How CBT-I Works
CBT-I is a highly effective treatment for insomnia disorder.
Treatment starts with a comprehensive assessment that I conduct to confirm a diagnosis of insomnia disorder and rule out other possible sleep conditions that may be contributing to sleep problems.
Then, I work with clients to educate them more about the processes that regulate our sleep and how certain habits developed over time may disrupt these processes.
Clients track their sleep on a daily basis, and through my coaching, they begin to implement changes to increase the efficiency of their sleep (i.e., increasing the percentage of time in their bed they are actually sleeping). Once their sleep efficiency is sufficiently high, we work on right-sizing the amount of time they spend in bed to help them get an adequate amount of sleep that they need.
Together, we also work on challenging certain myths around sleep and help to ensure that clients have tools they can use after treatment to keep their sleep on track.