Since I can remember, I have had difficulty falling asleep at night. As many others, I have trouble sleeping at night due to intrusive thoughts. Conversation replays, concerns about my children, and my greatest reel of embarrassing social gaffes and social blunders are all triggers for me at bedtime. My insomnia has been caused by early waking, hungry cats and tweeting birds. Whatever the reason, I feel stressed, anxious and desperate.
This is how I found Sleepio, a digital course of six weeks that uses cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), to overcome sleep problems. It was developed by Colin Espie who is a professor of sleep medicine at Oxford. Peter Hames, cofounder of Big Health, suffered from chronic insomnia and found success using CBT techniques after reading one Espies book. They teamed up to create Sleepio, which offers evidence-based cognitive-behavioral methods to help sleep-deprived people.
It worked well for me. I slept for seven hours straight for the first time in many years.
Sleep Problems
Many people sleep less than the recommended seven hours per night for adults. There are many types of sleep disorders, but over a third of Americans suffer from occasional symptoms of insomnia and one in ten have a chronic condition according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. The treatment options are generally divided into one of two categories: pharmacological or CBT.
The results of clinical trials comparing the two are quite remarkable, according to Rebecca Robbins, a sleep scientist at Brigham and Womens Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The behavioral component performs as well, if not more than the pharmacological treatment.
Side effects are common with drugs and can mask the true problem. I have found that medication makes me feel uncomfortably groggy in mornings and has little effect on the quality of my writing. The American College of Physicians and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence now recommend non-drug treatments, including behavioral therapies as first line treatment for insomnia.
I have also tried many sleep apps and gadgets that promised a restful night, but with little success. It can be difficult to understand what options will work for you and how to make the right choice from such a wide range of choices.
Robbins states that the market can seem wild and chaotic because not all products have been carefully reviewed in the scientific literature. You can sort through the noise by looking at products to see if any have been subjected to clinical trials or if they were developed in partnership with someone who has experience in sleep science and/or medicine.
Sleepio Success
Sleepio's course consists of weekly 20-minute sessions with many techniques to change certain habits. Sleepio via Simon Hill
Espies required that Sleepio be developed in a placebo-controlled, randomized trial. This was done to verify the safety and efficacy of the software. Sleepio was tested in 12 studies with more than 9,000 participants. It proved to be 54 percent faster to fall asleep, 62 percent shorter awake time, and 45 percent more functional the next day.
