3:00 in the morning and still awake. You have been lying on bed for four hours already. Research conducted by National Sleep Foundation shows that forty eight percent of Americans experience insomnia occasionally, while twenty two percent face it every or almost every night. Treatment had been suggested to cure it. But in some cases, staying awake has been more efficient than trying to sleep.
Insomnia is a condition which describes difficulty in sleeping, according to Sleep Education. Chronic Insomnia is a type of sleeping disorder that happens at least three to five times a week and can last for three months. Annals of Internal Medicine published recently a review of 20 sleep studies. It proposes how sleep restriction therapy is as beneficial as medication in curing difficulties in sleeping.
New York Magazine recommended sleep restriction therapy as the best way to treat Chronic Insomnia. It is an element of cognitive behavioral therapy specifically for insomnia (CBT-I). Chronic behavioral therapy provides cure for any chronic pain through a change of thoughts, beliefs and behaviors. CBT-I focuses on treating sleep disorders, such as Insomnia. Sleep restriction therapy is one of the less-inherent component of CBT-I but was proven to be effective.
Sleep restriction therapy allows an individual who finds hard to sleep to minimize the time spent trying to sleep to the number of hours one is capable of sleeping. This allows patients to record the number of hours they sleep for several weeks then permit them to set an unchanging wake up time. For instance, a person who gets to sleep for five hours every day and needs to wake up at seven in the morning should not allow himself to sleep until two in the morning. Once successfully done as repeated several times, patients should gradually increase, a fifteen-minute increment, the amount of time allotted for sleeping until they reach seven to eight hours of sleep every night.
Cognitive behavioral therapy specifically for insomnia (CBT-I) aims to change a patient's thoughts and behavior. Dr. Michael Perlis, director of the behavioral sleep medicine program at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine said, "People get very focused on total sleep time, on how much sleep they got, and they forget what actually pisses them off is not six hours of sleep - that's not great. But waiting for sleep, being in bed at the middle of the night staring at the ceiling? That's what you want to get rid of."
Sleep restriction therapy is viewed effective as it limits the time spend trying to sleep to the amount of time one is able to sleep. The idea is to make a person exhausted that once he gets to bed, he would eventually sleep faster. As what New York Magazine interprets, "You're so exhausted by the time you hit the pillow that you immediately fall into a deep sleep, so, in time, your mind starts associating your bed with actual, restful sleep.
