![]() ![]() Not just “get out of bed,” but put your feet on the floor and stand up. Sleep is a 24 hour cycle, and the cycle is anchored in the time you get out of bed in the morning. This will help keep your inner clock running on time. Get out of bed at a regular time, even on weekends, and even when you’re sleep deprived. KELLIE NEWSOME: There are seven steps to take when you have trouble sleeping. For now, let’s get into First Aid for Insomnia. CBT-insomnia is a specialized psychotherapy that is best done with a therapist, so we won’t go into all the details here but we will guide you toward some good resources for it at the end. If “first aid” doesn’t work, you may need something stronger, like cognitive behavior therapy for insomnia, or CBT-insomnia. That can keep a few nights of bad sleep from turning into months or years of sleep disorder. The first is sleep hygiene – it’s like first aid – a series of basic steps that work well when the problem is just beginning. It may not be perfect, but it generally does a better job than we can. You’ll see this theme throughout this podcast: Part of sleeping better is trusting your body to do its best. Sometimes they’ll draw in too much oxygen, or too little, but they’ll self-correct and smooth out any bumps along the way. Best to trust your lungs to do their job. If you think too much about your breathing, and try too hard to get just the right amount of air in, you’ll end up feeling more short of breath than before. Those are all natural reactions to insomnia, but they make the problem worse in the long term. ![]() When sleep works well, these two forces that make you sleep align at the same time each night. The circadian rhythm (in yellow) cycles every 24 hours. Sleep drive (in white above) rises the longer you stay awake. There are two biological forces that help you fall asleep. Things like sleeping in or napping to catch up, drinking more caffeine, or worrying if we’ll able to sleep the next night. We can get in the way of that repair when we do things to compensate for a night of poor sleep. The clock is pretty smart, and it usually resets itself if we let it go about its business. The clock is set by neurohormones like melatonin, cortisol, and about a dozen other chemicals that rise and fall over a 24 hour cycle. Sounds kind of arbitrary, but there’s some logic to those limits, and it has to do with the most common cause of insomnia.ĬHRIS AIKEN: When things are going well, our inner clock corrects itself after a night of poor sleep. At least 3 nights out of the week, for at least one month.When your sleep is such poor quality that you don’t feel rested even when you get it.īut all of us have a rough night from time to time, and insomnia is only a disorder when it happens repeatedly, and here we have numbers:.When you wake up in the middle of the night or early morning and can’t fall back asleep.When it takes more than half an hour to fall asleep.KELLIE NEWSOME: No one has perfect sleep, but how do you know when your sleep system is so broken that it needs repair? In this podcast, we’ll teach you how to repair your sleep, but first lets clarify what it means to have a broken sleep system, or as doctors call it – primary insomnia. Listen to the podcast or open in your podcast store Share it with your patients or – if you’re like the 1 in 4 of us who suffer from insomnia – try it yourself. Today, a special patient edition of the Carlat Psychiatry Podcast – A seven-step guide to better sleep. ![]()
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