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Sleep doctor says ‘restricting’ sleep is the key to curing your insomnia
About 30% of adults have symptoms of insomnia and 100% have trouble sleeping that’s severe enough to have daytime consequences.
Not getting enough sleep can severely affect your mood, health and general wellbeing, but a doctor has a hack that could cure your insomnia.
Sleep doctor’s hack to cure insomnia
Speaking on Steven Bartlett’s Diary Of A CEO podcast, sleep doctor Dr. Guy Leschzine explained one way to cure insomnia is to “compress or restrict your sleep” for a period of time.
MedlinePlus defines insomnia as�trouble falling asleep, staying asleep through the night, or waking up too early in the morning.
Rather than lying in bed trying to force yourself to sleep, you do the complete opposite and keep yourself awake and out of bed for longer. Eventually, your body will be forced to sleep and your entire routine will reset.
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Sleep restriction works by calculating your total time spent asleep on a typical night and adjusting time spent in bed to reflect that, the Sleep Foundation explains. If you are trying to sleep for eight hours but only getting five, you adjust your bedtime later to spend only five hours and 30 minutes in bed.
Once you spend the majority of your time in bed actually sleeping, you can then begin gradually increasing your time in bed.
The doctor explained that the first few nights people with insomnia try and restrict their sleep, they will sleep really badly.
“After a little while, they become so sleep-deprived that the brain starts forcing you to go off to sleep much more quickly,” he said. “Over time, more and more of that six hours a night will be spent asleep in bed and that’s the first step in breaking that negative association between bed and wake.”
This is part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia, which helps treat the disorder by restructuring the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are contributing to not being able to sleep.
Curing insomnia by staying awake
Leschzine went on to explain that a more severe insomnia treatment technique was developed in Australia called Intensive Sleep Retraining which forces people to stay awake for days on end.
People are brought into a sleep laboratory after being awake for around 36 hours. Every half an hour, they are given the opportunity to drop off to sleep, but as soon as they have been asleep for just three minutes, they are woken up.
This repeats every half an hour for 25 hours and as they get more and more sleep deprived, they begin falling asleep a lot quicker. By the end of the treatment, they will then be falling asleep straight away.
“The evidence suggests that’s a very good short-term treatment for chronic insomnia and in some individuals it works extremely well in re-associating your head hitting the pillow with drifting off to sleep,” he explained.
If you have insomnia, speak to your healthcare provider who can offer further advice. Some symptoms include finding it hard to go to sleep, waking up several times during the night and lying awake at night, the NHS explains.
Dr. Guy Leschzine is a neurologist and sleep physician in the Department of Neurology and Sleep Disorders Centre at�Guys�and St Thomas Hospitals in London.
