Sleep retraining (Harvard Blog)

Everywhere I look there are "sleep hygeine" articles that basically blame the patient for their problems. Can't sleep because you're stressed, don't exercise enough, bla bla... Well I have done all the sleep hygeine. I have had three (this month will be my fourth) polysomnographs. I have borderline sleep apnea, I have severely fragmented sleep. And it's been going on for about 12 years. If yoga worked, I'd be cured by now. Turns out there is an intensive treatment for insomnia but everyone expects it to "lead to drugs" that are supposed to be the next Ambien I guess. I've said it before, I won't wait, and I won't be dangled without any treatment.

So if you also want to try something you can do at home, get a willing helper, and do this over a weekend: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/overnight-treatment-for-chronic-insomnia-201202074207 I've saved it to https://web.archive.org/web/2019110...t-treatment-for-chronic-insomnia-201202074207 in case it's ever deleted or moved.

The basic idea is that this is a multiple person method of direct sleep retraining. Every 30 minutes, someone asks you to try to sleep. You try. If you succeed they let you sleep for 3 min and then wake you and ask you if you could tell you'd fallen asleep or not. It looks like this only works about 3 times in 25 hours for severe cases. But it should help.

Then you go home and maintain a sleep hygeine routine and hope for the best. Sleep hygeine does help some people, but for me it's about a 10% improvement. On the other hand, AFTER sleep retraining, it might be more effective.

I added this resource because it's so frustrating to keep reading the same information on every website, and then finally I found something that looks different and it's from a reputable source. I hope it helps you. Sleep well.