ANC News and Insomnia in Women

Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)

ABC News had a short video segment the other day where they talked about rewiring your brain for chronic insomnia treatment. The segment was focused on women who suffer with insomnia – some 30% say that they regularly take a pill to help them sleep, but I would imagine that everything they say applies to men as well. I’d urge you to go have a look.

The video segment basically goes over a couple of the basic practices of sleep hygiene, and throws in a couple of sleep restriction ideas at the end…

Basic Sleep Hygiene and Rewiring Your Brain

We all know that there are a few basic ideas surrounding sleep hygiene, and the piece covers a couple of them. Note that there are several more, but these are pretty major:

** Get rid of the sleeping pills. It turns out that they are only effective in the short term anyways, and all they do is mask addressing the real underlying problems of insomnia – the mental ones. It’s been shown that long-term, the only therapies that work for insomnia are the cognitive (or mental) ones.

** They suggest (good suggestion) to write down all your thoughts and worries in a journal or notepad you keep by your bed. This way, any recurring thought that goes through your mind can be put down on paper. If you wake up in the middle of the night thinking about something – write it down. It might be gibberish in the morning, but all that matters is that you got it off your mind. There’s a strange phenomenon going on here – when we write things down we tend not to think of them.

** Use the bed for sleeping only (and for sex, too, but this was prime-time TV so you could hardly expect them to say that). The idea here is to associate the bed with sleep. It may take some time, but eventually your brain will get the connection.

** The final part of the video talks about sleep restriction. There are several methods of this – and the most basic is simply going to bed and getting up at the same time every day. They go into something much more radical from Australia – I suggest you watch the video to learn about that one.

Everything they say here (with perhaps the exception of the Australia experiment) has been proven to work over the long term.

Cognitive training trumps medication every time we look at sleep!

Posted by Doug at BuildBetterSleep.com