Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to Overcome Insomnia

Insomnia is generally characterized by restless sleep, difficulty staying asleep or difficulty to sleep soundly. Like many other insomnia sufferers, you might want to turn to sleeping pills. However, research and studies on sleep shows that your own attitude is often the cause of insomnia. Changing these attitudes can make you sleep soundly.


The following therapies can help you transform your negative thoughts and habits.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is known as an effective alternative treatment to replace insomnia drug, even for people who suffer from chronic insomnia problem.

CBT is the treatment of simple and need only a short time. CBT has long been used to treat various conditions, including depression, panic attacks, anxiety, and eating disorders.

Studies have shown that physical factors and habits play an important role in causing the occurrence of insomnia and CBT are effective in treating insomnia. CBT is most beneficial for everyone, including parents who have used drugs to sleep for many years, people with physical problems such as lack of rest leg syndrome, and those who are still experiencing insomnia early, or have experienced a lifetime is not enough rest .

How Cognitive Behavioral Works

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) helps you change your thoughts and actions that interfere with your ability to sleep soundly. This approach is based on the idea that the way you think (cognitive) and act (behavior) affects how you feel.

Cognitive part of CBT teaches you to recognize and change false beliefs that affect your ability to sleep. For example, you may believe that sleep 8 hours every night is an obligation to feel the benefits of sleep. In fact, 7 hours of sleep may be enough for you. CBT also straighten out misconceptions about the actual amount of time you spend sleeping. People with insomnia often sleep more than they realize.

Part of action (behavior) CBT helps you reprogram parts of your brain that regulate sleep-wake cycle. These therapies address the specific actions that the experts called by the term "sleep hygiene", which negatively affects your sleep. This behavior could be due to exercise or drink caffeinated beverages right before bedtime.

Treatment with this therapy is usually performed for 4-8 sessions with a time of 30 minutes per session with the help of a therapist. This approach is effective for various levels of difficulty and usually consists of one or more of the following elements:

1. Cognitive control and psychotherapy. This type of therapy helps control or eliminates negative thoughts and anxieties that keep you awake. It also eliminates erroneous beliefs and worrying about sleep, such as the idea that one night without a break will make you sick.

2. Sleep restriction. This approach tries to adjust the time you normally spend in bed with a long sleep you actually need. Reducing the amount of time in bed that you usually do without sleep will increase your desire to sleep.

3. Remain passive when awakened. This is called paradoxical intention, include measures to avoid the attempt to sleep again, with the goal of eliminating the anxiety you feel when you want to fall asleep again easily.

4. Stimulus control. This method helps eliminate negative cues that you bring to the neighborhood bed and put a positive response to sleep. For example, you might just be interested to use the bed only for sleeping and having sex with a partner.

5. Sleep hygiene. This therapeutic method of correcting the basic habits of daily life style that affects sleep, such as smoking or drinking too much coffee or alcohol at night or do not exercise regularly. In addition, there are also tips that will make you sleep more soundly, like soaking in warm water 1 or 2 hours before bedtime.

6. Relaxation exercises. This method helps you relax and reduce or eliminate the things that disturb sleep with meditation, hypnosis and muscle relaxation.

7. Biofeedback. This method of measuring a particular psychological signs, such as muscle tension and brain wave frequency, with the goal of helping you control it. The most effective way is by combining a number of these methods. Given the Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), in contrast to barbiturates, which require regular practice can make even a few approaches you cannot sleep at first did.