Improving Your Sleep

Course

Session 2 Sleep Scheduling

Week 2 Sleep Scheduling

This session will: Review your sleep diary and review your own sleep

efficiency rating

Help you to schedule a completely new sleeping pattern

Help you to understand how your thinking patterns can affect your sleep and how to make changes

Sleep Efficiency

Week 2 Sleep Scheduling

Review Sleep Diary

What was your sleep efficiency index? Was it 85% or less?

What was the average number of hours sleep over the

past week?

Scheduling a New Sleep Pattern

Strengthening The Connection Between Bed and Sleep

A good sleeper thinks of ‘bed’ and thinks ‘sleep’. What is the connection between bed and sleep in your experience? ‘Maybe tonight I will get some sleep’? Phobia of going to bed? Lying awake tossing and turning? Thinking about ‘bed’ makes you anxious.

It will be easier to remain asleep if

your mind and body can make a sleep

response to an important cue: your

bed.

Strengthening The Connection Between Bed and Sleep

• Bedtime activities – don’t use bed for anything other than sleep (exception is sex). Don’t use laptops, tablets or phones.

• Napping – Remember the importance of the bed / sleep connection. Daytime is for wakefulness – no napping!

• 15 minute rule – If sleep doesn’t come within this time, get out of bed

and go into another room. Estimate when 15 minutes have passed, don’t watch the clock. Apply same if waking in the night.

– Stay up until you feel sleepy-tired. Tiredness is not the same as sleepiness.

Strengthening the Connection Between Bed and Sleep

Applying the 15 minute rule takes discipline and commitment. You will get up and down a few times during the night, remember this is all in a good cause! This really will be worthwhile to get your sleep pattern in order.

Setting Your Time In Bed

• The next goal is to start achieving the same amount of sleep every night.

• Rising time – you need to anchor your sleep around a fixed morning rising time to encourage a reliable pattern.

• Threshold time ‘sleep window’ – People go to bed for a variety of reasons: ‘it’s bedtime’, ‘everyone else has gone to bed’. You should go to bed at a time which makes it likely you will sleep right through the night. Set a threshold time to mark the point at which you can cross the threshold from waking to sleeping by subtracting your average sleep time from your morning rising time.

Scheduling a New Sleep Pattern

• Example of threshold time: – Average sleep: 6 hours – Rising time: 7am – 7am minus 6 hours = 1am. – You can then go to bed at or after this time providing

you feel sleepy-tired. • You must apply this at all times, including weekends!

Scheduling a New Sleep Pattern

1) Stay up until threshold time

2) Lie down in bed only when you feel sleepy tired

3) Do not use your bed for anything except sleep

4) If you don’t sleep within 15 minutes, get up and go to another room and wait until you feel sleepy tired before returning to bed

5) If you still can’t fall asleep or if you wake up, repeat number 4

6) Get up in the morning at your rising time

7)Do not nap at any time before your threshold time

8)Follow this rigidly 7 days / nights a week

Scheduling a New Sleep Pattern

• Once you’ve achieved a 90% sleep efficiency rating, you can increase the amount of time spent in bed by 15 minutes (either by going to bed 15 mins earlier or rising 15 mins later).

• If you still achieve 90% sleep efficiency after a week of your new sleep window, you can increase it by another 15 minutes.

• Completing sleep diaries are crucial to your improvement.

Session 5 Summary

Quick Break

Evaluating Sleep - Related Thoughts

Evaluating Thoughts About Sleep

Step 1 Record the thought as carefully as you can

Step 2 Consider how this thought makes you feel and write it down

Step 3 Evaluate it and write down a more helpful, accurate thought

Step 4 Consider how thinking this new way makes you feel

A lot of worries about sleeplessness are based on information and beliefs that are not accurate. Beliefs aren’t facts. Negative thoughts increase arousal and will contribute to your insomnia. Use thought records to evaluate and change inaccurate and negative sleep-related thoughts.

Example

Thoughts about sleep

How this makes me feel

A more accurate thought would be

How the new thought makes me feel

I am awake half of the night, everyone

else is sleeping

Anxious, annoyed, jealous

I slept for 6 hours and was awake for 2 hours which was

75%, not 50%. Other people have sleep problems too

Reassured, optimistic, less angry

I’m never going to get to sleep

Out of control I always get some sleep and will get to sleep, the average in my diary was 6

hours

More in control, able to focus

Session 2 Summary

Session 2

Homework • Sleep diary and thought record. • Application of today’s session sleep

scheduling including setting a rising time, threshold time and the 15 minute rule. Use the thought record to evaluate thoughts.

What’s Coming Next Session? • Sleep hygiene and relaxation.

Thought For The Week Ahead