Sleep Therapy: Everything You Need to Know

Just one night of missed sleep can leave your brain foggy and your body fatigued. As those sleepless nights add up, the toll they take on your body increases, raising your risk of accidents, obesity, and heart disease. While several treatments are available to help you with your sleep struggles, not all are equally effective or equally safe. Sleep therapy offers you an effective, drug-free solution for those sleepless nights. Here is what you need to know about therapy for sleep disorders.

Understanding Therapy

Therapy might be more commonly associated with mental health concerns, such as stress, depression, or anxiety. However, it can be effective for sleeping problems, too. People with issues sleeping often turn to medications to help them fall asleep and stay asleep, but medications can carry both side effects and risks. Sleep medications also might not be a good choice for long-term use. They are most effective for temporary use and should typically be used sparingly and as needed.

Sleep aids also do not address the underlying cause of sleep loss. Therapy does. Therapy can help you identify the issues interfering with your rest. With therapy, you can learn to make powerful behavior changes that eliminate bad habits and overcome unhelpful thinking patterns. The treatment goes a step beyond the conventional and often unhelpful suggestions to change your lifestyle and provides you with targeted strategies that work for you.

Therapy is so effective that it is considered a first-line treatment for insomnia. Working with a therapist can help you develop better stress management, improved relaxation, and a healthier sleep-promoting lifestyle. With the right choices during the daytime, you will be ready for bed by night.

Techniques: What to Expect

Ongoing sleep problems can be difficult to overcome and manage, but therapy for insomnia can help. During therapy, you can identify unhelpful thinking patterns, eliminate sleep-disrupting behaviors, and develop healthier habits to help you get the sleep you need.

Various techniques can be incorporated into your therapy experience, including:

• Cognitive interventions such as hypnosis to challenge or change certain beliefs about sleep
• Psychoeducational intervention to identify how your beliefs, behaviors, and sleep habits connect
• Behavioral changes, including relaxation to nurture healthier sleep hygiene

When people struggle with sleep, they can develop unhealthy attitudes and behaviors as they attempt to improve their rest. If you have insomnia, for example, you might become anxious about your ability to fall asleep or stay asleep. You might depend on alcohol or other substances to make you sleepy or spend excessive amounts of time in bed tossing and turning in an attempt to get some sleep. During the day, you may depend heavily on caffeine or nicotine to power through the fatigue. You might develop even unhealthier coping mechanisms.

Therapeutic interventions are designed to help you get to the bottom of your sleep problems, including:

• Breathing exercises to slow your heart rate and breathing and calm your mind
• Muscle relaxation to relax your body
• Mindful meditation to help reduce stress and anxiety
• Hypnotherapy to partner with your mind

You may also be provided with information about good sleep hygiene.

The Benefits and Effectiveness of Therapy for Sleep

Therapy is highly effective for people with sleep problems. Research indicates that therapy is more effective than drugs when it comes to long-term relief from insomnia. Perhaps equally important, therapy is shown to improve psychological outcomes. With therapy, you can fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer, and have a higher quality of sleep, too. For this reason, many doctors recommend therapy as a first-line treatment.

The risks and side effects associated with therapy are low. However, you might experience some discomfort when it comes to confronting negative feelings or beliefs. Your therapist can give you tools to manage those, too, and develop healthier coping mechanisms.

Although face-to-face therapy is possibly the best-known iteration, research indicates that therapy administered via telemedicine can be equally effective. One study found that not only does it offer similar improvements on sleep outcomes, but telemedicine therapy also allows for more efficient treatment. In other words, the delivery mechanism is not as important as the actual therapy. A sleep app can provide you with powerful access to healing therapy while improving your overall sleep quality and quantity. Visit us today to learn more about how you can use a sleep app to get the best rest of your life.