Tag Archives: CBT

How to make an end to your insomnia

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Insomnia is a huge problem for many people. Not sleeping well can really ruin your day. Unfortunately when people have insomnia they usually take the wrong measures. In this blog post therefore I will give you advice on what to do to stop your insomnia and how to improve your sleep quality.

insomnia slep CBT

Insomnia is what keeps us awake at night

Alyssa L. Miller via Compfight

Why do I have insomnia?
Insomnia can have many different causes. Pain, worries, stress and apnea are among the most common ones. Usually what happens is that poor sleep starts a vicious cycle in which: poor sleep leads to worries about sleep, which in turn leads to ineffective measures, which finally leads to poor sleep.

  1. Poor sleep. We all have a bad night of sleep every once in a while. What changes poor sleep into insomnia are the thoughts we have about not being able to sleep.
  2. Worries about sleeping. When you sleep wrong once, it is easy to start worrying that next time you won’t sleep well either. Also, you might worry about how you will feel the next day or about things that might go wrong because of your lack of sleep.These thoughts actually make it more difficult to sleep and raise your anxiety level. This leads many people into taking measures.
  3. Taking ineffective measures.Unfortunately these are usually not the most effective ones. For example, many people start checking the clock to see how much time they have been awake, which makes them even more worried. Others might start taking naps during the day “to make up for the bad night of sleep”, which actually causes them to have more trouble sleeping at night, because they’re not tired anymore. These ineffective measures complete the vicious circle of insomnia since they cause poor sleeping.
Insomnia sleep CBT

The vicious cycle of insomnia

It is important to know that whatever the cause of your insomnia is, you can do something about it:

What can I do when I don’t manage to fall asleep?
If you cannot fall asleep there are several things you can do:

  • Create your own sleeping ritual. It is important to prepare your body for the night and give it a sign that you’re going to bed. So try to create your own ritual before going to bed. You could include brushing your teeth, stretching your body, reading a book. Do this ritual every day before going to bed and you will see your yawns becoming more and more frequent around bed time.
  • Use your bed only for sleeping. This is an advice that many people find logical but hardly anyone complies with. How easy is it to have breakfast in bed, to watch a movie, to read a book… However, all these activities create a wrong association in the brain: they tell our brain that our bed is for staying awake. That’s why it’s extremely important not to use your bed for other activities than sleeping.
  • Use the 15 minutes-technique. The 15 minutes-technique is one of the most effective techniques to stop insomnia. It is based on breaking the connection of bed-awake and changing it into the healthy connection of bed-sleeping. It consists of the following steps:
    1. Try to fall asleep.
    2. If you don’t fall asleep within 15 minutes you get out of bed and you go to another room.
    3. Once you’re in the other room, you engage in a boring activity like reading the dictionary or the encyclopedia until you feel sleepy.
    4. When you feel sleepy you go back to bed. You try to fall asleep.
    5. If you don’t fall asleep within 15 minutes, get out of bed and start another (or the same) boring activity. When you feel sleepy you go back to bed.
    6. Repeat the steps until you fall asleep. Most people fall asleep within 1 or two cycles of the 15-minute technique. It’s used in all effective Cognitive Behaviour Therapy programs for insomnia. Try it!
  • Do not check your clock. Most people who suffer from insomnia check the clock all the time to see for how long they’ve been awake and how much time they can still sleep. Don’t do this! Watching the clock activates our brain, (especially the digital clocks) and causes you to stay awake instead of falling asleep.
Time Clock Insomnia Sleep

Do not check your clock when you can’t sleep: it will only make you become more awake!

  • Change your thoughts. When you can’t sleep it’s easy to start thinking about how annoying it is that you’re unable to fall asleep, how crappy you’ll feel tomorrow, and how bad this important meeting will go because of this. At night the frontal part of our brain is less active, which causes our worries to run freely, without control. When this happens try to tell yourself that even though it might feel this way now, tomorrow the world will look different. Also, be a judge of your thoughts and try to think about days that you have been sleepy. Were you really unable to do anything? Was it that horrible?
  • Improve your surroundings. Try to make sure your sleeping conditions are optimal. So make sure your bed is comfortable, your mattress is soft (or tough as you prefer), and your pillow gives you the right support. Make sure the temperature in the room is about 16-18 degrees, warmer or colder makes it difficult to fall asleep. Also, prevent daylight from coming into your room, it causes our body to wake up, even though we don’t want to. And last but not least, make sure you don’t hear noise in your room, wear ear plugs if necessary.

So as you can see, there are many things you can do if you suffer from insomnia.

Please let me know what you think about the tips and which ones work best for you! Also, if you have any tips please share!

How to gain control over your anxiety: 7 useful tips

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Many people suffer from Anxiety at some point in life. The most common fears are: getting an illness, loosing your job, hurting or losing the people around you, underperforming at important events or not being liked by the people around us. Luckily, anxiety does not need to control us. In this post you will find 7 useful tips about how to fight anxiety:

  1. Know your anxiety. Knowing what makes us anxious is the first step in reducing our fear. Try to keep a notebook of situations in which you felt nervous or anxious. Write down what happened, when it happened and what you thought. This will help you to find patterns in your anxiety.
  2. Remember that anxiety won’t last forever. Anxiety is the reaction of our body to a situation we perceive as frightening. It prepares us to fight or flight from a dangerous situation. Many people think that if they don’t do anything to stop anxiety, it will go on forever. Fortunately however, our body cannot stay in the “fight-or-flight” mode for a long time. If we stay in the situation long enough our anxiety level will always go down!

    Anxiety curve

    The red line shows how most people think Anxiety works. The blue line shows that our Anxiety always goes down if we stay in the situation long enough.

  3. Expose yourself to your fears. Usually when we´re afraid, we start avoiding the situations we fear. For example someone who’s afraid of getting an illness might avoid sick people,or going to the doctor. When we avoid we tell our brain that something dangerous is really about to happen, and we can never discover if the opposite is true. By exposing ourselves to our fear and staying in the situation long enough, our anxiety will go down.
  4. Schedule worry time. Sometimes it can be difficult to stop worrying. The best thing you can do is to schedule 1 hour during the day in which you have to worry. During the rest of the day write down your worries in a booklet and save them for your worry time. It might sound strange to force yourself to worry but it´s the best way to gain control over our worries.Worry time Anxiety
  5. Tire yourself. Our body can only be anxious when we have the energy for it. One of the best ways to fight anxiety is to engage in exercise. Take the bicycle, go for a run or go skating. The more tired you are, the less anxious you´ll be.
  6. Breathe properly.The way we breathe can greatly affect how we feel. When you feel anxious try to take deep and slow breaths. Try to raise your abdomen with every breath instead of your chest. This will increase the oxygen level in your body and make you feel more relaxed.
  7. Change your diet. Reduce the amount of coffee, tea, energy drinks and cola you consume. They´ll make you more anxious, which is just what we want to prevent.

As you can see there are many things we can do to gain control over our anxiety. For more useful tips check out the tips from the Anxiety and Depression Association. Also, if you have any questions feel free to comment. I’ll answer them gladly :).

I’m curious about your experiences. What do you do when you feel nervous or anxious? Did the tips help you?