Best treatments for insomnia… period…
Saturday, April 27, 2024.
This is the therapy combo that conquers chronic insomnia…
The best treatment strategy for insomnia involves a combination of cognitive and behavioral components delivered in person by a therapist, according to a review of the research.
The review involved a comprehensive analysis of 241 studies involving over 30,000 adults.
The results showed that the most effective components of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) are:
Cognitive restructuring involves identifying, challenging, and changing unhelpful beliefs or thought patterns.
Third-wave techniques include mindfulness, acceptance, and identifying core beliefs.
Sleep restriction: limiting the amount of time spent in bed to the actual time spent asleep.
Stimulus control: learning to associate the bed and bedroom only with sleep.
In-person therapy.
Together, these components emerged as pivotal for maximizing CBT-I benefits.
Dr. Yuki Furukawa, the study’s first author, said:
“We expected to find some behavioral components (such as sleep restriction and stimulus control) beneficial, but it was surprising to find that some cognitive components (such as cognitive restructuring and third-wave components) were also effective.”
This stuff sounds good, but makes little difference…
On the other hand, the following treatment strategies for insomnia were found to do little good, but were not harmful:
Sleep hygiene education: aimed at creating an optimal sleep environment and routine, including a consistent sleep schedule and comfortable environment.
Automated encouragement: getting reminders, messages, or positive feedback through, for example, an app.
In contrast, the researchers found that both waiting for treatment and relaxation procedures were potentially harmful.
The researchers are not sure why relaxation techniques appear harmful for insomnia, but speculate:
“In the treatment of insomnia, relaxation might lead to lying down longer while awake, which might counter sleep restriction or stimulus control.”
Self-help effective
While in-person therapy for insomnia is likely to be best, the study found that self-help formats with human encouragement were similarly effective.
So, for many people with insomnia, most of the therapeutic benefit can be achieved by being pointed in the right direction to the correct resources and then being given encouragement to stick to those techniques.
Dr. Furukawa said:
“Overall, our findings identified several essential components of CBT-I which can lead to an intervention that maximizes treatment efficacy, minimizes treatment burden and increases scalability, that is, makes it easier to offer this treatment to more patients.
Further large-scale trials are needed to confirm these contributions.
We hope that our research encourages practitioners who are interested in CBT-I to learn streamlined CBT-I, so that in turn more people who experience insomnia can be offered this relatively simple, noninvasive yet potentially powerful psychotherapy.”
Be well, Stay KInd, and Godspeed.
