Compact Sleep: Sleep Restriction Therapy

Today’s lesson will cover the 1^st element, and the one that many CBTi experts consider the most vital, Compact Sleep.  You will learn why Compact Sleep is so central to beating your insomnia and I will give you step by step instructions on how to execute your compact sleep plan.

Measuring Sleep Efficiency

Compact Sleep is all about how much time you spend in bed sleeping versus not sleeping.  It’s foundation is the functions and mechanisms of sleep.  

If you ask a good sleeper to describe their night in bed, they would say that they go to bed, fall asleep, maybe get up in the night to go to the bathroom, fall back asleep quickly, wake up in the morning, often times before the alarm goes off, and get going on the day.  They don’t ask “Do I have insomnia?”

If you ask a person with insomnia the same question, thy would like likely say that they go to bed, lay in bed for 30 minutes or more waiting for sleep, wake up several times during the night and struggle to get back to sleep each time.  If it is a weekday, they wake up reluctantly when the alarm goes off, but usually after hitting the snooze button a few times.  If it is the weekend, they will stay in bed as late as possible trying to catch up on all their lost sleep.

The key difference I want you to focus on is that the person who sleeps well mainly sleeps during the night while the person with insomnia spends a high % of their night not sleeping.

How you got insomnia: At some point in your life, even if it was many years ago, you were a good sleeper.  Something happened, and now you spend much of your bed duration not sleeping.  What happened?  How did you diverge from the functions and mechanisms of sleep?

Basically you got into some flawed habits trying your very best to cope with a bad situation.  As we explained in lesson 3 on insomnia, you had a trigger that caused a short bought of insomnia such as a stressful life event like a bad relationship or high job stress.  In response, you decided you needed to catch up on your lost sleep and so you spent more time in bed by going to bed earlier or sleeping in later.  You kept asking the question Do I have insomnia?  It felt great to get an extra hour’s sleep, so it seemed like the right decision. What you didn’t realize, was that you were cutting yourself short on your sleep pressure with longer term negative results.

In lesson 2 when we covered sleep, we learned that from the time you wake up until you go to sleep, your brain is steadily building up adenosine which causes your brain to get more and more sleepy.  Your brain relies on you building up enough sleep pressure to give you the reserves you need get to sleep quickly and to stay asleep through the night.

Lets say that you require 7 hours of sleep.  There are 24 hours in the day, so if 7 hours are spent sleeping, then you need 24 minus 7 which equals 17 hours to build up your sleep pressure.  What you didn’t realize when you started adding an extra hour in bed was that you were cutting your sleep pressure by an hour.  So you only built up your sleep pressure for 16 hours rather than 17 hours.  This made it harder to get to sleep and to stay asleep.  After a night or two of robbing yourself of this much needed sleep pressure, you started finding it harder to get to sleep and to stay asleep.

Even after the original insomnia causing event occurred, you were into a new sleep pattern that perpetuated the insomnia.

So that is a likely scenario as to how you went from a good sleeper to someone who struggles to get a good night’s sleep.

Problems with non-compact sleep: But now, the problem is a bit more complex.

1^st – you are spending too much time in bed, which means that your sleep pressure isn’t fully developing so you don’t have the sleep reserves you need to sleep well.

2^nd – you have lost confidence in your ability to sleep. You think it is beyond your grasp.  You think that your sleep system is broken.  After all, you have tried many different potions and methods to improve your sleep, all posted on the internet, and none of it is working, so it must be you, right?  Not right.  Your sleep systems are working fine and dandy and they always will.  You just need do the right things and sit back and let sleep happen as it is supposed to.

3^rd – you have come to believe that you have to work at  sleep.  You think that whereas sleep comes easily for other people, it is a struggle for you, and unless you work at it, it just ain’t going to happen.  Well guess what.  Sleep does just happen and you can’t force it.  Let me explain what is happening. 6:44

Cause and Effect: Humans are great at identifying cause and effect.  We get hit by our sibling, feel it hurts, and learn not to tick them off again.  We see a ball hit a window, see the glass shatter, and learn that balls can break windows.  The problem is that we often get these cause and effect relationships all wrong.

For instance, we try singing in front of a family member, they tell us that we sound terrible, and so we avoid singing for the rest of our lives, even though we likely have a perfectly fine singing voice.  We visit someone and they are impatient and rude to us.  We conclude that we caused their rude reaction because they don’t like us when in fact they had a migraine headache.

In the same way, we can have a good nights sleep and put the cause on the wrong source.  We take a herbal tea and sleep well and we think the herbal tea caused us to sleep well.  We read a book before bedtime, sleep well that night, and think the book caused our good nights sleep.

But that’s just not true, and here is why:

This is how sleep works:

#1 – You stay up long enough for your sleep drive to build to the point that you can sleep well.

#2 – Your circadian rhythm prepares your brain to go from wakefulness to sleep, which signals to your brain that it can go from its wakeful state to its sleep state.

#3 – Your brain makes sure it is safe to sleep.  Sleep is your most vulnerable time of day, so your brain is not going to let you sleep unless it feels safe.  Stress, anxiety and fear will stop you from sleeping well.

As long as you don’t have any of the factors for insomnia covered in lesson 3 interfering with your sleep, the chances are, you will have a decent night’s sleep.  This is the functions and mechanisms of sleep. 

And that is it.  Stay up long enough, get ready to sleep, be calm, and let sleep happen.  You don’t and can’t force anything.

2 key points:

1^st , I say that you have a reasonable chance of a good nights sleep, because you can’t make sleep happen directly.  All you can do is set up the conditions for sleep, and then let go and let the brain do what it has been designed to do for millions of years – sleep.  Nobody hits 100%.  Occasionally not sleeping well is perfectly normal especially if you are experiencing any type of stress or insomnia causing event.

2^nd , In terms of things that you believe help you to sleep but are not in the CBTi curriculum, I have this to say: Herbal tea and reading before bed do not change your sleep drive nor do they change your circadian rhythm.  They might help you prepare for sleep if you happened to turn the lights down and if they helped you calm down.  They also might have taken your mind off your worries and relaxed you.  But directly, they did not cause you to sleep.

The point is that there are any number of things that you can do to relax and prepare for sleep.  There is no magic formula and certainly no single cure all.  Find what works for you and be flexible as you change over time and what helps today might not be what helps a year from now.

Another way of thinking of this is to look at the causes of insomnia list in lesson 3.  If you think your herbal tea or reading before bed causes you to sleep well, then look on the list.  I don’t see “stopped taking herbal tea” or “stopped reading” as a cause of insomnia.  If their withdrawals don’t cause insomnia, it is unlikely that using them cures insomnia.

<Reduce causes of insomnia>  

It is important to repeat again what has been said in the past 2 lessons, that if you have anything that is causing insomnia, you should take care of this first to the degree that you are able to.  I will give an abbreviated list here.  Go to lesson 3 on insomnia and either read the show notes or listen to the episode for a more complete list and see your health care provider for a thorough analysis. Cymbal

Causes of insomnia fall under 4 main categories: Psychological or in the mind, the body, environmental and ingested chemicals.

Psychological factors include work and relationship stresses and anxiety disorders.

Body factors include pain, restless legs syndrome, hyperthyroidism, sleep apnea, medical conditions, heart burn, allergies, hormonal shifts and medical conditions.

Environmental considerations include excess noise or light, shift work and an uncomfortable bedroom or bed.

Chemical factors include caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, drugs and medications.

It is your responsibility to do what you can to minimize these sleep disrupting issues.  My job is to help you get the best sleep you can given your imperfect situation with regard to these sleep disruptors.

It is not herbal tea nor the book that causes your sleep.  It is preparing for bed and relaxing and letting your brain naturally take you to sleep.  But by now you probably have it firmly entrenched that certain things you are doing or taking are causing you to sleep or causing you to not sleep.  You keep asking do I have insomnia.  They are not directly responsible for your sleep.  I will repeat, the things that are responsible for your sleep are:

1 – A healthy sleep drive built up by staying awake long enough.

2 – Your circadian rhythm triggering your brain to go from alertness to sleep.

3 – An absence of stress and fear

4 – Minimal sleep disruptors.

Bust Out of Insomnia: But right now our focus is to bust out of your vicious insomnia cycle.  This is going to be tough, so it will take you extra effort and discipline to undo these habits and associations.   Compact sleep works mainly on the first factor listed, increasing your sleep drive.  It also starts to regulate your circadian rhythm and will reduce your sleep stress, but the other CBTi elements deal more directly with these elements.

Compact sleep works by increasing your sleep drive to the point that you have trouble keeping your eyes open and you can’t help but sleep.  By doing this for a while, you will start to get to sleep quickly and begin to spend much more time sleeping and much less time awake while in bed.

This creates the confidence you need to prove to yourself that your sleep system is working just fine.  This reduces your sleep related stress.  It is that simple and very effective.

High sleep efficiency means that you use your bed efficiently for sleep, so most of the time you spend in bed you are sleeping.  Low sleep efficiency means that you don’t use your bed very efficiently for sleeping, you waste your time on getting to sleep or waking up and staying up during the night.

I will show you how to measure your sleep efficiency later in this lesson, but you probably already know intuitively whether you are an efficient sleeper or not.

Sleep efficiency is important for a few reasons.  The 1^st is that it is a high predictor of whether you have insomnia or not.  If your efficiency is low, then you likely have insomnia.  If we improve your efficiency, then your insomnia will improve.

The second is that poor sleep efficiency by itself perpetuates insomnia. When it takes you an inordinately long time to get to sleep it causes stress.  You start to worry about if or when you will ever get to sleep which is stressful.  The same goes for night awakenings.  If you wake at night and can’t get back to sleep, it likely leads to stress, wondering if you will ever get back to sleep and how poorly you will feel the next day and how hopeless the situation is and so on.

And the third is that low sleep efficiency weakens your sleep system: If your sleep efficiency is poor it means that you are going to bed earlier than you should and or you are getting up later than you should.  This means that your sleep drive is weaker because the time from getting out of bed to going to bed is shorter than it should be and your sleep drive, which builds up steadily the longer you are awake, has not had time to become a strong as it needs to be for you to easily get to sleep.  Because you start your sleep with the sleep drive weaker than ideal, then the sleep drive, which gradually reduces while you sleep, is also weak in the middle of the night, so it makes it harder to get back to sleep if and when you wake up in the middle of the night.

I like to put it this way.  Sleep is like a roller coaster.  Your sleep stages are like all the turns and ups and downs of the roller coaster ride.  To start the ride, you need to take that long initial climb up to the top of the first summit.  Not having enough sleep drive is like having the roller coaster cars stalling before getting to the top.  You can’t start the first descent until you reach the peak.  In the same way, you can’t fall off to sleep easily until you have built enough sleep drive.  That is like laying at wake at night trying to get to sleep because your sleep drive has not high enough yet.

Continuing the roller coaster analogy, If you manage to start on the first descent without reaching the first peak, then you won’t make it through all the twists and turns and ups and downs.  You will get to a smaller incline, but won’t be able to make it all the way up.  That is like waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep because you started the night with a low sleep drive.

So low sleep efficiency mean that you have lost confidence in your ability to sleep well, causes unnecessary sleep stress and perpetuates your inability to sleep well.

Now we need to get into some technical details to see how we measure how compact our sleep is, how compact your sleep should be, and how to get from where you are to where you want to be.  Ready for the ride of your life?

Lets first talk about how compact your sleep is and Sleep Restriction Therapy.  I will go through this once to give you an overview and then again more slowly to fill in the details.

Here is the overview: Compact sleep is measured by sleep efficiency.  Sleep efficiency is the ratio of how much time you are sleeping, which I call sleep duration divided by how long you stay in bed which I call bed duration.  Sleep duration divided by bed duration.

Your bed duration goes from the time you get into bed at night until the time you get out of bed in the morning.  So to get sleep efficiency you take the amount of time you sleep, your sleep duration, divide it by your bed duration and multiply by 100.  Your goal will be to be between 80% and 90% sleep efficiency.  Simple as that.

This is difficult to explain clearly in audio format, so I recommend that you head over to my website at sleeptohealthy.com for a written explanation, sleep efficiency calculators, flow charts and worksheets.  Everything you need to work through this rather technical aspect of CBTi is available in lesson 5 at sleeptohealthy.com.

Now lets dig into the details to see how this fits together with an example

First bed duration.  Note the time you go to bed and the time you get up in the morning.  That duration is your bed duration.  Even if you got out of bed during the night, you still count that as part of your bed duration because the intent at night is to sleep all night in your bed.

So lets say that you go to bed at 10 pm and you get out of bed at 7 am.  Then your duration is 9 hours.  You get that by starting with 7 am and counting back the number of hours to get to 10 pm, when you went to bed.  Even if you got out of bed to read for an hour during the night because you couldn’t get back to sleep, you would still count it as a full 9 hours.

The only caveat is that if you read in bed before turning out the lights to sleep, then use the time you turned out the lights as the start of your bed duration.  Same goes for nights that start with sex.

In the morning, you should get out of bed and get active right away.  This helps to set your circadian rhythm to a regular schedule which your sleep system loves. 20:59

<non-sleep time>

The next part, sleep duration, is a bit more tricky.  That is because it is hard to measure sleep time directly because if you keep looking at the clock to measure your time awake, it will likely cause you to stay awake longer than you normally would.

Your bed duration is composed of 2 activities, sleeping time and non-sleeping or awake time.  The way you calculate your sleep duration is to measure your awake time and subtract it from your bed duration to get your sleep duration.  Let me explain.

Awake time would include the time it takes for you to drift off to sleep.  It also includes all the times you are awake during the night, whether you stay in bed or get up to do something else.

If you go to my website I have method to estimate your awake time.  The method is awkward to explain on audio but easily explained on the website with diagrams, calculators and tables.  The basics of it are that you record the time you were awake in the previous awakening on a conveniently placed piece of paper.  In the morning, you add up your awakenings for your total awake time.  If you sleep with a partner, they can help estimate your time it takes for you to initially get to sleep.

Your sleep duration is equal to your bed duration minus your awake time.

Although I discourage wearables for tracking your sleep, this is the one exception where a wearable could be helpful in calculating your sleep efficiency.  Just do your best not to use it as a performance measuring device as that can lead to sleep stress.  And don’t worry about your different sleep stages.  Also be aware that wearables are often not very good at detecting sleep, so I would still recommend you write down your awake times and make sure it corresponds to what your wearable is telling you before trusting it.

<Calculate sleep efficiency>

Sleep efficiency is calculated as a percentage.  100% sleep efficiency means that as soon as you laid down in bed you fell asleep instantly, you slept all the way through the night without interruption, and in the morning you got out of bed as soon as you woke up.  You would have spent 100% of your time in bed fast asleep.  Nobody sleeps at this level. 24:30

0% sleep efficiency would mean that you got into bed and did not sleep a wink all night long.  In the morning you got out of bed not having had even 1 minute’s sleep.

By the way, insomniacs like you are notoriously poor at estimating your sleep efficiency. If I was to hook you up to a sleep monitoring device which accurately measures the amount of sleep you actually had, your estimate would probably be about 1 hour less sleep than the sleep monitor would indicate.  So you are likely sleeping better than you think!  And that is why we need to measure it and not just estimate it off the top of your head.

The way that you measure your sleep efficiency is as follows: sleep efficiency = sleep duration divided by bed duration x 100.

A normal sleeper has an efficiency of 80 to 90%.  What does this mean?

Lets say they get 7 hours sleep a night.  If their efficiency is 80%, they are going to spend 8 ¾ hours in bed to get that 7 hours sleep and spend 1 ¾ not sleeping.  7 hours sleep duration divided by 8 ¾ hours bed duration = 0.8 or 80%.  If their efficiency is 90%, then they are going to spend ¾ of an hour not sleeping.  So for a person needing 7 hours of sleep a night, it would be considered perfectly normal for them to be awake up to 1 ¾ hours a night.  That’s quite a bit of awake time

<Allowed wake time>

What I want you to focus on here is that you can be a normal sleeper and have a whooping 1 ¾ hours of awake time each night.  I think this might surprise you as you likely think that being awake that amount of time each night would classify you as a poor sleeper and having insomnia.

<Nighttime Awakenings:>

Another thing to point out is that night time awakenings are perfectly normal and everyone has them, and I mean everyone.  A very good sleeper does not necessarily remember them as they gently ease out of sleep for a few minutes and then drift back to sleep and don’t remember it in the morning.  But when people are hooked up to a sleep monitory for the night, they always show nighttime awakenings.  This makes sense as night time awakenings are necessary for human survival.  You are susceptible to dangers while sleeping so you need to wake up periodically to check things out.

<Back to sleep efficiency>

Now back to your sleep efficiency.  You should do this exercise a for a week and then take the average.  Make sure you include at least one night before a weekend or non-working day.  I have a calculator for calculating the average on my sleep to healthy.com website.

As an example, let’s assume that your average bed duration is 8 ¾ hours and your average awake time was 3 hours so your average sleep duration was 8 ¾ minus 3 which is 5 ¾ hours.  This is how much time you are averaging per night sleeping.  5 ¾ of sleep with a bed duration of 8 ¾ hours gives a sleep efficiency of 66% which is below the 80 to 90% average.

29:00 So what do you do with this information?  You use it to determine how long your initial bed duration should be to compact your sleep.  The rule is simple.  Your new bedtime duration is equal to your average sleep duration as long as this is not below 5 hours.  If your average sleep duration is below 5 hours, set your bed duration to 5 hours.  In our example case the bed duration would be set to 5 ¾ hours.  This is just your starting point.  I will show you how to adjust it as time goes on in a minute.

You may also judge this as harsh, which it is.  Compacting your inefficient sleep is not easy and research has shown that you are much more likely to be successful at compacting your sleep if you go cold turkey and make your bed time a bit on the short side rather than on the long side.  I want to cure your insomnia as quickly as possible so you will have to endure a few nights with less sleep than normal to get to the light at the end of the tunnel more quickly.

If you have trouble figuring out your sleep time for whatever reason, take your best estimate of what your sleep time is and go from there.  It is better to start with an imperfect number than to not start at all.  You could think back to when you used to sleep well and estimate what your sleep time was then.

When figuring out when to go to bed and wake up, the normal recommendation is to keep your wake time the same and adjust the time you go to bed.  So in our example, if you normally wake up at 7 am, turn the clock back 5 ¾ hours and you get a bed time of 1:15 am.  Yep.  You heard that right.  1:15 am.  It is also important to keep your wake up time consistent each day.

Some insight from Dr. Daniel Erichsen: <Daniel Audio>

<Go to sleep with wife>

When I did my sleep efficiency training, I found that going to bed at night out of sync with my wife was too stressing, so I opted for going to bed at the same time as my wife and waking up early.  For me that meant waking up at about 4:30 am for a while which I actually came to enjoy.  An important aspect of CBTi is to use the system to work for you, not against you.  As you know, the #1 enemy of sleep is….say it with me….fear, stress and anxiety.

Do this for two weeks while continuing to record your sleep efficiency.  Don’t expect a gradual and even improvement.  Each night will be different, some better and some worse.  But you want to look for the overall trend.

<How to adjust>

At the end of the 2 weeks, look at your last 3 or 4 days sleep entries.  Here is how you adjust:

If your sleep efficiency is above 90% then you have earned yourself an extra 15 minutes of bed duration.

If your sleep efficiency is between 80 and 90%, then steady as she goes.  Don’t make any changes yet.

If your sleep efficiency is below 80%, then reduce your bed duration by 15 minutes but don’t bring your bed duration below 5 hours.  You need 5 hours to get a reasonable amount of N3 or deep sleep which is important for your health and well being.

Keep going, adjusting weekly until you find your bed duration where your efficiency is between 80% and 90% and you feel reasonably well rested during the day.  There are complete instructions for how to adjust your sleep duration along with an easy to follow flow-chart on my sleeptohealthy.com website.

Dr. Daniel Erichsen had this to say: <Insomnia insights #14 – ~0:10 congrats part, #21, 0:20 onwards – see what is salvageable, sleep restriction therapy follow up>

If you are 65 or older, you can use a sleep efficiency target of 75 to 85% rather than 80 to 90%.  This means if your efficiency is below 75% then reduce your time in bed by 15 minutes, if your sleep efficiency is above 85% you can increase your bed duration by 15 minutes.  This is because it is normal and natural for your sleep efficiency to decrease with age.  You will have a harder time getting to sleep and you will have more frequent and longer night time awakenings.  And we don’t want to out compete mother nature as it will only lead to frustration and stress.

It can take 4 weeks or longer to figure out your sweet spot.  Don’t get impatient if it doesn’t work quickly.  You are undoing a whole swack of bad habits and conditioned responses that you have built up over years so it will take some time.

If all this has your head spinning, then head over to my website at sleeptohealthy.com for a written explanation, sleep efficiency calculators, flow chart and worksheets.  Everything you need to work through this rather technical aspect of CBTi is available in lesson 5 at sleeptohealthy.com.

On a positive note, you might notice something unexpected happening.  Your ability to endure sleeplessness might be better than you were expecting.  In other words, you might be as tired or even more tired than before.  You likely will feel even more wretched than before.  But you might also notice that you are able to be less short tempered, less irritable and more able to focus and be productive.  Your life will be better even though you are sleeping less.

This is because you are going through this ordeal by your own choice and with an attitude of hope.  This should demonstrate to you that at least part of your sleep suffering is from your attitude and beliefs about sleep and insomnia, and not totally about the experience of insomnia itself.  Pain is part of life.  At least some of the suffering is optional.  Even with sleep deprivation, you can still laugh at a joke, feel the joy of being with someone you love, relish a walk outside or just take a breath and appreciate the miracle of being alive.  The difference is that you are taking control of your insomnia, not your insomnia controlling your life.  Enjoy the change of mindset.

The other is that your sleep episodes should be longer.  You will feel better with less total sleep when that sleep is less interrupted than you feel with longer, but more interrupted, sleep.  This is a great lesson to learn.

<Warnings> 3

Now that you understand the harshness of this method, a couple of warnings are in order.

First, you should consider consulting your health care provider before starting this.

Second, it will likely make you even more sleepy and lower functioning during the day at least for a while.  If being even more sleepy and more foggy thinking during the day could have serious consequences, then you need to weigh the longer term potential benefit against the shorter term risk.  A sleep professional may be able to help you work through this with a modified schedule and monitoring if this is an issue.

If you judge that compacting your sleep in this way will have negative effects on you, then you need to act with prudence.  For instance if you operate heavy equipment or drive for a job, you will want to decide if temporarily restricting your sleep will put you or others in danger.  I don’t know your situation, so you have to make the best judgement for your situation.  If you think that compacting your sleep might interfere with a medical condition, such as triggering seizures, or if you have bipolar disorder, then you should consult your health care provider before embarking on this element of CBTi.  Only you can make the decision between long term benefits and short term price.

Only you know your particular situation so I cannot advise you one way or the other as to whether this element of CBTi is suitable to you.

I would say that working on your sleep efficiency is the hardest but also fastest way to get you out of your insomnia rut.  A few weeks of suffering can provide a lifetime of relief.  Be tough and ride it out.  But if you notice any medical condition deteriorating then quickly consult your health care provider.  If you believe you are putting yourself or others at risk for safety, then react appropriately.

The adjustments to your sleep duration are made gradually because you need to let your brain create a new normal.  One night of high efficiency will not do it.  It needs to be sustained so your brain is trained on the new expectation.

One of the challenges to going through this process is staying up when you really, really want to go to sleep.  You want to balance being stimulated enough to stay awake with winding down and relaxing so you can get to sleep quickly when bedtime arrives.  I don’t have any hot tips for you.  You will have to figure that you by yourself.  But keeping the body moving such as walking, cleaning, organizing or even standing is better than being in a position where sleep is likely to take over too soon.  Even standing while watching TV or reading a book can help.  Remember, this endurance feat is temporary.  A few difficult evenings will give long term beneficial results.

Here is some advice from Michael Schwartz: [Helpful words for CBTi – don’t give up, less time in bed, hard,]

During the day you may be inclined to nap.  It is preferred not to nap, but if you do, do your napping before 4 pm and limit your nap to 20 or 25 minutes.  Napping might be necessary to achieve a level of alertness and focus you need for your job.  If you sleep longer you will begin to deplete your sleep drive and defeat the purpose of this exercise.  You should find that the nap will improve your alertness level and make it easier to stick to the program.  You decide whether a nap is appropriate in your situation.

If in the future you find yourself starting to slip back into having insomnia, one of the first places I would look is your sleep efficiency.  I will give a personal example that shows how we naturally look for causes that don’t exist when we should be looking at sleep efficiency, your new sleep metric.

A short while ago I was noticing that I was having more trouble than usual staying asleep.  I seemed to be waking more often, and when I awoke my mind was more active than usual which made it harder to get back to sleep.  It was wintertime and sunrise was long after I woke up.  Also, in the summer I am physically active all day long whereas in winter I tend to spend a lot of time being idle on the computer, although I do exercise and go for long walks most days.  So I convinced myself that my insomnia was due to my not getting exposure to sunlight 1^st thing in the morning and being idle.  I was starting to despair and wondering if I should look at a winter holiday down south and start using a bright light therapy light upon wakening.  Then it dawned on me that my sleep efficiency was down because I had gradually increased my bed duration to make up for the lack of sleep.  As soon as I realized this, I restricted my sleep duration to where it should be and my nighttime awakenings returned to their normal state within a night or two.  This shows you how easily it can be to get mislead about the sources of our insomnia and how easy it is to get back on track once you have been through the CBTi regime.

In the future, after you have gone through compacting your sleep, you likely won’t even have to measure your sleep efficiency it to know whether it is an issue or not.

At this point I would like to offer you a free service to help you sustain your sleep efficiency over the long term and not fall back into bad habits like I did.  I find that I tend to slowly drift back into bad habits accidently because life is busy and its hard to stay focused on every healthy habit.  Just asking yourself whether your sleep efficiency is where it should be from time to time gives you an opportunity to re-evaluate and decide if you need to focus on your sleep efficiency for a while to get it back on track.

So I have created an email reminder service for you.  I will send you a reminder every month to ask how your sleep efficiency is.  That’s it.  A quick question for you to think about and decide whether you should act or not.  And the only time you will receive these messages is once every month.  You won’t be signing yourself up for anything else, no other messages or emails.  Go to sleeptohealthy.com for lesson 5 to let me know if this is a good fit for you.

Now that we are starting to get into the tough elements of CBTi, I would like to point the way to some help from Dr. Daniel Erichsen <Daniel plug in app and services to help>.

The magic of Dr. Erichsen’s app, BedTyme, that is time spelled with an Y instead of an I, tYme, is that this feature rich app comes with personalized coaching from Dr. Erichsen, a CBTi expert.  There will be a link to the app on my website.

Wrap-Up, Conclusion

<summarize, what’s next, sound snippet from next, assignment >

So that is it for Compact Sleep or Sleep Restriction Therapy. If you are researching it on your own, you should use the proper CBTi term, sleep restriction therapy.  I don’t like that term because it focuses on the wrong aspect of the practice and scares people off.  That’s why I call it Compact Sleep.

Next lesson we will be covering Sleep Buddy.  This is the 2^nd of the 2 most powerful of the CBTi elements and is as counter intuitive as compacting your sleep is.  With sleep Buddy we are going to learn how to tell when you should be heading to bed, what to do when you can’t get to sleep, what to do when you wake up at night and how to stop your brain from jumping around like a tree full of monkeys.  Courtesy

49:26<sound snippet – Michael – # 13 – 2:10 – #1 failed strategy for sleep>

<2>Assignment: (give an assignment with each lesson)

This lesson, like the other lessons, comes with an assignment.  You can find the assignments at sleeptohealthy.com.  In fact, sign up for our email newsletter at sleeptohealthy.com and receive the assignments as soon as the lesson is released.  Knowing the assignment ahead of time helps you to focus on what’s important during the lesson.

I’m sure you can guess what today’s assignment is.  Your assignment, should you decide to accept it, is to compact your sleep.

All the instructions are at my sleeptohealthy.com website.  Go there and work the plan.  Its as simple as that.

Well that’s it for Lesson 5.  It would be great to hear from you & how this course is helping or frustrating you by using any of the easy to use contact methods sleeptohealthy.com.

And now my disclaimer spoken in one breath.

 

 

Disclosure:

This podcast is not a substitute for advice from a qualified healthcare professional.  The sole purpose of this podcast is to educate and entertain.  As we do not know your particulars, we cannot and do not provide professional or medical advice or services.  We strongly encourage you to consult a healthcare professional before incorporating any ideas in this podcast.  Listeners who use the information in this podcast do so at their own risk.

Outro:

By structuring this as a course on curing insomnia, it keeps you focused on the core skills you need to improve your sleep. You don’t need tons of sleep trivia and people’s opinions about sleep.  You just need to know proven instructions on what you can do today, to sleep better tonight, so you can feel and function better tomorrow. This allows you to repeat lessons as it’s hard to absorb all the knowledge the first time through, and the information will make more sense after you have the context of the whole course.

You, like most people, will likely benefit from repeated listening.  The lessons will be updated based on student feedback. So the next time you listen to the same lesson, it may be improved since last time.  And that’s about it. Thanks for joining my in my sleep class.

I look forward to seeing you again on the next episode of the sleep to healthy podcast. See you then.