Why sleep restriction therapy is growing in popularity

‘By reducing your “sleep window”, you’re raising the stakes, giving your powers of sleep a real challenge, which brings out the best in them’

Recently, I decided to try to deal with a bout of insomnia by deliberately getting even less sleep. If this strikes you as absurd, I can only reply that it’s no more absurd than what most insomniacs do instead: lie awake in bed for hours every night, getting more wakeful the harder they try to drop off, while ruminating on horrifying existential truths. (Such as: did you know there isn’t an infinite supply of This American Life podcasts? Only insomniacs discover this.) Besides, “sleep restriction therapy” (SRT), as it’s known, is growing in popularity; some evidence suggests it’s as effective as pills. When you’re sleeping poorly, your instinct is to spend more time in bed, to catch up. To which SRT arches an eyebrow and enquires: “Oh yes? And how’s that working out for you?”

Seek expert advice before deliberately depriving yourself of sleep, but the basics of SRT are simple. First, pick a fixed getting-up time – let’s say 7am – and enforce it like a fascist. Second, over a week or two, work out how much sleep you really get per night, on average. Say five hours. Now the hard part: your job is to stay out of your bedroom, and awake, until five hours before your rising time – 2am. If five hours is all the sleep you get, five hours is all you’ll have. (Don’t go below 4.5h. As things improve, you’ll gradually extend time in bed: see http://ift.tt/1Jo6bSM.) If my experience is anything to go by, you’ll be bleary and irritated as you struggle to stay up – and, at first, exhausted during the day. But you’ll also start sleeping remarkably deeply.

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from Health & wellbeing | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1UaU5ql
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