For Your Bedroom Only
How much time do you spend in your bedroom when you are not sleeping? What are you doing there? Did you know that all the non-sleeping activities in your bedroom could be making your sleeplessness worse?
An alternative therapy for insomnia treatment is stimulus control and is founded on the idea that in order to cure insomnia, you need to re-train your brain to associate your bedroom only with sleeping (ie with no other stimulus). You, in effect, want to train yourself to be stimulated to sleep while in your bedroom, because you have taken away every other activity that might otherwise be suggested by being in your bedroom.
Stimulus control therapy derives from the idea that a person with chronic insomnia associates bedtime and the bedroom with not being able to sleep.
The technique limits the amount of time spent in the bedroom for non-sleep activities to retrain the brain to associate bedtime and the bed/bedroom with successful sleep attempts rather than sleeplessness. The general guidelines of stimulus control are:
- Go to bed only when you are sleepy.
- Don’t read, watch television, eat or do other non-sleep things in bed.
- If you are not asleep within 15 minutes, leave the bedroom and don’t return until you are sleepy.
- If you are awake at night for more than 15 minutes, get out of bed.
- Have a consistent wake time every day, regardless of how much sleep you got.
- Avoid naps.
For more information about how the Stimulus control theory works, check out Wikipedia.
And – get out of your bedroom for everything except sleeping (well, almost everything….) 
Subscribe