CBT for Insomnia
The Underused, But Recommended Treatment
Sleep Better Without the Pills
SleepSpace is a personalized sleep improvement program built from leading researchers at Harvard, Penn State, and the University of Arizona.
Stop the frustration at bedtime and in the middle of the night with a solution that gets to the root of your sleep challenges. Join hundreds of thousands of SleepSpace users today who have overcome their struggles with falling asleep and staying asleep.
If you get one sleep app in 2024, make it SleepSpace. We use it in our Sleep Challenge because of its ability to connect all major wearables and use smart sounds to enhance sleep.Dave Asprey, Father of Biohacking
Did you know that the recommended first-line treatment for insomnia is typically not a pill, but 6-10 weeks of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBTi)?
We built SleepSpace based on CBTi principles. This means changing your habits, thoughts, and behaviors around sleep. By addressing patterns that cause sleep disruptions, SleepSpace is designed to promote sleep health and consolidate sleep.
The solutions outlined below may be more or less relevant to your particular sleep need. Simply being aware of the below rules and methods for promoting healthy sleep can give you the tools you’ll on addressing your sleep conquering and sleeping your personal best.
Our grant funded research with the National Institute of Aging demonstrate that we can use technology to finally improve sleep. SleepSpace can used as a stand-alone system or with a trained sleep coach.
SleepSpace is Based on the 5 Major Aspects of CBTi
Relaxation Training
Relaxing sounds and meditation techniques to deactivate the flight or fight response and the always on mentality that many of us are currently suffering from. Every human being should be able to reliably reduce their heart-rate over a 10 minute period. Its ridiculous we don’t teach this in our schools, but you can now get free access to our meditations to help train your brain to relax. Learn more
Myth Busters (cognitive training)
Discover how to think differently about your sleep to overcome maladaptive thoughts that can negatively impact your sleep quality. Sometimes we start to form negative, maladaptive thoughts around sleep after not being able to do it well for so long. Learn more
Sleep Hygiene
Habits that everyone should know in order to improve your sleep quality. The relevance of these habits to improve your sleep can be more or less important for your particular sleep situation. Take a moment to think about how simple changes like those outlined here can improve sleep. Sometimes its as simple as getting an extra cool blanket for your sleep partner.
Sleep Restriction or Compression
This involves restricting you time in bed in order to build up your sleep drive and consolidate your sleep. Be sure to consult your doctor regarding this intervention. Usually it involves moving your bedtime to a later time in order to ensure you are tired when you go to bed and can sleep throughout the night. Once sleep starts to become more efficient, you then gradually move the time in bed back to a more regular duration. Often times individuals who suffer from insomnia think, "If I can't sleep at night, I'll need to spend much more time in bed to get the sleep I need." They then start to go to bed earlier and earlier. However, this only makes insomnia worse because it results in people not being tired when they go to bed and therefore spending more time awake in bed. You can evaluate how successful you are in consolidating your sleep using the Sleep Diary found in the SleepSpace app. If you are spending more than 85% of the time in bed asleep, then you are on the right track!
Stimulus Control
Associate your bed with sleeping – save the bed for sleep and sex only. We are like pavlovian dogs, trained to fall asleep and wake up based on cues in our environment. Looking on the bright side, this means we can create cues for ourselves that entrench a deeper night of sleep.
