CBT strategies to help you sleep
Sleep is a nonnegotiable biological necessity. ―Matt Walker
👥 Serves: 1 person
🎚 Difficulty: Medium
⏳ Total time: Ongoing
🥣 Ingredients: Bed
🤓 Wholebeing Domains: Discomfortability, Positive Emotion, Rest, Ritualising
💪 Wholebeing Skills: Calm, Hosting yourself, Peacefulness, Refuge, Relaxation, Relief, Self-regulation, Serenity, Sleep, Stress management
CBT strategies to help you sleep
📝 Description
Self-initiated informal strategies to help you sleep.
In his TED Talk, Matt Walker defines sleep as “Mother Nature’s best effort yet at immortality.” Sleep deprivation provokes damaging consequences on your learning abilities, your immune system, and your wellbeing overall. Matt claims that “the shorter you sleep, the shorter your life span.” In our recipe “Sleeping Well” we shared a few tips to help you get a good night’s sleep, but what if you still struggle to fall asleep or have a full night’s sleep? The following recipe, CBT strategies to help you sleep, shares different CBT-based* strategies that might be helpful to send you to sleep. It has been adapted from a webinar on sleep that we joined and that was organised by The Wellbeing Project and featured Educational Psychologist Diane Gillespie, author of Stories for Getting Back to Sleep.
To find out more about Diane and the book, please visit https://www.dianemgillespie.com. We also invite you to watch Matt Walker’s TED Talk “Sleep is your superpower”.
*CBT stands for cognitive behavioural therapy and the goal of these informal strategies is to modify the sleep environment and replace beliefs that lead to sleep deprivation or reaching for meditation.
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Important: We shared this recipe as part of our blog post “Wellbeing for Ukraine” and you can access a translated version here (kindly translated by our changemaker friend Nadiia Mykhalevych).
👣 Steps
Step 1 – Meditation
Whether it is guided or your own practice, meditation can go a long way to help you go to sleep. Research has found that having your own meditation practice is more effective than following a guided one.
Step 2 – Trauma Tapping Technique and Emotional Freedom Techniques
Trauma Tapping Technique is a proven self-help method for relaxing emotional stress that you can perform while waiting for professional help. Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) is a system of tapping on meridian points. It alleviates stress, physical and emotional pain and trauma in a non-invasive way. EFT helps lower the major stress hormone cortisol significantly more than other interventions tested. More info here.
Step 3 – Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR)
ASMR is an experience characterised by a static-like or tingling sensation on the skin that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. More info here.
Step 4 – Image and metaphor reframing
Image and metaphor reframing is a technique used in therapy to help create a different way of looking at a situation, person, or relationship by changing its meaning.
Step 5 – Journaling
Try journaling for 5-10 minutes before going to bed. But instead of focusing on what you accomplished during the day or what you are grateful for, write out your to-do list for tomorrow, because that is what keeps you up at night, the never-ending list of tasks, deadlines, etc.
Step 6 – Narrative reframing
Narrative reframing is the approach used by Diane Gillespie in the book “Stories for Getting Back to Sleep”. Narrative reframing is about crafting sleep scenarios designed to help you fall back to sleep in the middle of the night. Here is a sleep sample from the book, a story titled “At the beach”. You can also check out the respective recipe “Narrative reframing for sleep”.