It’s time to revisit cognitive and behavioral treatment for insomnia that’s caused by sleep anxiety.
If haven’t read the article about sleep anxiety, or if you need a refresher, go back and read it now. I’ll wait here for you.
OK, so now you know that sleep anxiety is one of the major insomnia causes. How do you solve it using cognitive behavioral insomnia treatments?
First you have to put your feelings and thoughts into words. It’s one thing to have a feeling or a thought repeat itself endlessly in your head. But it’s another thing to know exactly what it’s trying to tell you — to put it into words.
If you’ve been keeping a sleep diary as recommended in Day 1 of this Insomnia Self Help Tutorial, you will have a good collection of various thoughts you have when you can’t sleep, and hopefully you’ve already written some of them down.
Everyone’s specific thoughts and worries will be a little different. But I will use my own experiences as an example.
When I suffered from sleep anxiety, I would worry and obsess over these things:
- I worried about my physical health. I thought my immune system would suffer if I didn’t get my sleep.
- I worried about my mental health. I heard stories about prolonged sleeplessness leading to mental and emotional problems and even serious mental breakdown.
- I worried about feeling tired the next day.
- I worried about never getting any better; that insomnia would become a permanent lifelong condition.
- I’d worry about my performance at work the next day, wondering how I could cope after a sleepless night.
Do any of these thoughts sound familiar to you? Maybe you have a few other thoughts you can add to this list.
You’ll probably find that most of your worries revolve around the major issues of
- health, both mental and physical
- feeling too tired to perform properly at work or at home
- never getting any better and
- having a brain defect.
(OK, maybe that last one is a bit peculiar, but I threw it in there just in case you have hypochondriac tendencies like I do.)
As part of your cognitive and behavioral treatment for insomnia, you need to replace these negative, anxious thoughts with new thoughts that are encouraging, helpful, and most important, more ACCURATE AND TRUE.
At first, the new thoughts will not sound convincing to you. That is OK. You do not have to believe them in order to work on this program.
Here’s the deal: in order to change your thinking, you have to repeat the new thoughts to yourself over and over again, on a daily basis.
These are NOT “affirmations,” by the way. Affirmations are short positive phrases that you say over and over again, but they often don’t work very well because they are too far-out and unbelievable to be convincing.
For example, if you feeling very angry at someone, an affirmation might be: “I feel peaceful and loving towards everyone. All is well.”
But that’s not the way it really is; you actually feel very angry. This affirmation, as nice as it sounds, will not help you deal with the anger. It will just deny it. You might feel better for a moment, but it probably won’t last. This is NOT what cognitive or behavioral treatment for insomnia is!
The Replacement Thoughts you will be saying over and over to yourself do not deny reality. In fact, the first thing you do is admit to the reality and the way things really are. But then you encourage yourself and give yourself good and logical reasons to change your thinking.
Eventually, if these replacements make sense to you, your habit-forming brain will accept them and they will become automatic. It won’t happen in an hour, so don’t expect instant results. Just keep plugging away, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what happens down the road a bit.
Continue to Day 6 of the Help-for-Insomnia Tutorial.
Return to the Self Help for Insomnia homepage.