Treatment

Probably Yes, if:  

• You have trouble focusing and concentrating during the day due to problems falling asleep, staying asleep, and/or waking too early, and  
• You have these problems even though you have enough time to sleep, and  
• The problems have happened at least three times a week for around three or more months.  

It’s normal to have problems with sleep due to stress like an illness, a new job, or even something minor like jetlag. Problems start when our worries about sleep and our efforts to improve it end up making our sleep worse. As we continue to worry and “try” to sleep we start to LOCK IN THE PATTERN OF INSOMNIA. In other words, we LEARN how to sleep poorly by what we do to deal with trouble sleeping and with the tiredness we feel during the day.   

So do the sleep experts. The New England Journal of Medicine, the American Psychological Association, and the National Institutes of Health recommend Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) as the most effective and preferred treatment for chronic insomnia. CBT-I beats medications, doesn't lead to dependence or lose effect over time like medications do, and doesn't give you  medicine side effects or the problems with thinking or driving like sleeping pills do. And most people stop taking sleeping pills altogether with CBT-I!

The good news is that CBT-I helps you UNLEARN the habits that have caused your insomnia over time and gives you the skills to sleep normally again!  

CBT-I is one of the most well-studied and recommended treatments for chronic insomnia. Seventy to eighty percent of people’s symptoms clearly improve and most people maintain improvement at one-year follow-up.    

It usually takes just five to eight sessions to get good sleep and to start developing new and better patterns for healthy sleep. Throughout treatment we track your progress to ensure that your sleep gets better and stays better once we are done.

Firsts we do a clinical assessment of your current sleep patterns. For the next two weeks you will complete a nightly sleep log to see what your sleep pattern looks like right now. Then we make a treatment plan that fits your needs. At that point, if you are ready, we start treatment! We change the thoughts and behaviors that are interfering with your sleep. You’ll be provided with education and homework assignments that will help improve your sleep. Throughout the process we will assess progress and make changes when necessary. On our last session we’ll develop a long-range plan. Follow-up sessions can be scheduled as needed.