Free Sleep Soundly Every Night, Feel Fantastic Every Day by Robert S. Rosenberg Page B

facing page).
    Seventy to eighty percent of people with insomnia find CBT provides reliable and prolonged benefits.
ONLINE COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY
    This is great for people in locations that do not have sleep specialists and others trained in nonpharmacological treatments of insomnia. These programs are conducted online, and you communicate with someone trained in CBT. You will be offered various nonpharmacological techniques such as stimulus control, sleep restriction therapy, and cognitive restructuring. Your therapist will review your progress weekly and make online recommendations. The treatment period may vary, but the average is eight weeks.
RELEASE TENSION AND RELAX BEFORE GOING TO BED
    In my experience, many insomnia sufferers show an inability to close down the day emotionally. They refer to it as being too stressed. In a book called Sound Sleep, Sound Mind: 7 Keys to Sleeping through the Night, Barry Krakow, MD, postulates that an inability to identify, feel, and process emotions is what sets many with insomnia apart from good sleepers. The insomniacs think about emotions rather than experience and process them. This leaves them going to bed with their brain on overdrive. Dr. Krakow’s theory is that if we learn to feel and process our emotions during the day, we will sleep better at night. Certainly, it would seem to be a better way than medications.
    Here are three exercises to help you wind down and release emotional tension at the end of the day:
    1.   Noticing : When a parent notices a child acting out for attention, a common phrase is “I notice that you are … paying attention, eating your green beans, picking up your toys.…” Noticing the small things is a practice of paying attention, and when you pay attention to your emotions, they dissipate. With your eyes open or closed, feel your way through your body, starting at your head and moving down. Notice if your neck holds a pain, your shoulders are burdened, your expression is tight, your chest feels heavy, or your gut is angered and so forth. When you do notice an emotion, stay with it; or move into the center of it and notice how much lighter the emotion feels.
    2.   Noticing with Words : The “name it and tame it” aspect of emotions includes self-talk. Close your eyes and feel your way through your body, noticing each important emotion as it rises. Then, speak softly the noticing statement: “I notice my shoulder feels angry. I’m angry at not finishing the conversation with my boss. I accept [or acknowledge, own, release] my anger .” Then, you feel your way to thenext emotional area: “I feel twinges in my gut. The twinge is the emotion disgust. I was disgusted with the way the child in my classroom pushed another, and I did not speak up strongly enough. I acknowledge this emotion.”
    3.   Writing What’s on Your Mind : The idea of noticing and accepting our emotions before sleeping is to get the inside out. Writing in a journal may be easier than verbal or visual noticing activities. When you write what is on your mind or in your emotions that bothers you, this form of self-acceptance or acknowledgment in physically writing out the emotions releases any pent-up energy around the issues, as you keep writing long enough to feel the tension dissipate and your breathing become more relaxed.
    Any training that helps you relax such as deeper, effective breathing, biofeedback, yoga stretches, guided imagery exercises, and light hypnosis sleep tapes, can be very effective in assisting you to sleep. You choose what you like to do, and would look forward to doing because you would feel better, more relaxed, and quieter inside. These factors motivate you so you don’t feel like you “have to” work harder at sleeping or “do one more thing!”
    For people with hyperarousal syndrome, several relaxation therapies can help them to retrain this anxiety pattern. I suggest patients