Treatments for Insomnia
A lot of people feel that they have insomnia because they can’t fall asleep or they wake up all the time. While this may feel like insomnia, it is often another sleep problem. Without a proper assessment of your sleep, you may end up trying to fix your sleep problem with the wrong solution.
If your problem is indeed insomnia, your healthcare provider will often suggest one of the three main behavioural treatments for insomnia. They are Stimulus Control Instructions, Sleep Restriction Therapy, and Sleep Hygiene Techniques. All three approaches correct sleep-preventing associations and provide beneficial information about sleep.
These three behavioural treatments are the most widely used therapies designed expressly for insomnia. Some behavioural treatments that have demonstrated success in treating non-sleep related disorders have also been used to treat insomnia. These treatments include relaxation training to reduce somatized tension, cognitive strategies to correct sleep damaging cognitions, systematic desensitization, hypnosis, classical conditioning, bright light therapy, and biofeedback.
