If you were to ask someone, “What’s causing your insomnia?” they might say something like: “my stress, anxiety, my brain won’t shut off”, maybe they think it’s their cat waking them up or they drank too much coffee or they watched a scary movie before bed. <br />And granted, all of these things can mess with your sleep for a night or two, or more, but they aren’t the thing that causes chronic insomnia. In most cases chronic insomnia is caused by 1 bad habit where you accidentally trained your brain not to sleep. <br />Staying in bed awake. <br />This is the worst thing you can do for your insomnia. <br />And it’s the key to one of the most effective treatments for insomnia, CBT-I, an evidence based treatment for insomnia that has shown up to 80% effectiveness at relieving insomnia. <br />You see, when you lie in bed awake, maybe you went to bed too early, or you’re trying to force yourself to sleep, and worrying about all the things - what you said that day…what’s going to happen with your job…whether that one guy likes you…or any number of other things, you’re basically training your brain that the bed is the place for worrying and lying there awake. <br />So one aspect of the most effective treatment for insomnia is, if you can’t sleep, get out of bed. If you can’t sleep, and it’s been more than 15 minutes, get out of bed, do something that’s not too stimulating, and when you start to feel drowsy, go lay back down. Now I know this sounds miserable. You probably think “I’m going to be so tired” this will just make it worse! And yes, that’s true, you may be more tired in the short term. But, within a week or so, it’s most likely going to improve sleep efficiency, the percentage of time that you spend in bed actually sleeping. <br /><br />So as you retrain your brain, you’ll fall asleep faster, you’ll stay asleep longer, and you’ll spend less time lying awake getting angry that you’re not sleeping. <br />Again, this is a core principle of CBT-I, it literally rewires the brain to sleep better. They have imaging studies showing that after CBT-I, people have improved cognitive functioning, decreased stress, and improved memory. And most importantly, you sleep better.
