| It's great the author found that CBT-I worked for them, but I'm amazed it took them that long to find out about sleep hygiene. As a life-long insomniac, I learned about sleep hygiene in the 80s. I don't think they called it CBT-I back then. I've done the sleep restriction, I've done it all. However, the author did pick up on something I've been speaking with a lot of people about more recently. Usually people associate insomnia with stress. For non-chronic insomniacs, I can see how this would be the case, and seeing as only 10% of the population are chronic insomniacs, for most people, insomnia will be transient, and increased cortisol, and active mind during stressful times obviously creates the opportunity for this condition. For many of the chronic insomniacs I've been speaking with, both onset and maintenance (wake up in the middle of the night), it seems many agree that our minds are just active at that time. Not stressed, sometimes not even that active. I can meditate in the middle of the night and still spend the next 45 minutes awake. There is a part of our brains that kinda likes it. I think calling this an "algorithmic solution to insomnia" is misleading. |
It seems like that phrase usually refers to the things the author mentions as being "necessary but insufficient," not to the CBT-I components that they had newly discovered (which I sometimes summarize as "teach yourself that sleep is not as important as you think it is, and then maybe you'll be able to sleep").