How sleep restriction can improve sleep quality (and duration!) when you have chronic insomnia

If you’re struggling with chronic insomnia, you may have heard of the term “sleep restriction” — now, you might think that you’re already dealing with this since your sleep probably feels quite restricted already!

However, this term refers to an evidence-based behavioral technique that involves spending less time in bed by allotting less time for sleep. This helps to improve sleep quality and, ultimately, sleep duration.

Sleep is a core biological process. It’s something the body always does and our ability to sleep is not something that we can ever lose. If we remain awake for long enough, we will sleep.

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Now, if you’ve lived with insomnia for a long time, you might be asking why sleep drive doesn’t seem to be working for you — why you can be awake for so long during the day and night, and yet still find it hard to fall asleep or sleep through the night. Well, the answer to this can be found in the arousal system since the arousal system is capable of temporarily suppressing sleep.

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Ultimately, the arousal system is a survival mechanism. If you were a caveman and you saw a saber-toothed tiger prowling around outside your cave during the night, you wouldn’t want sleep drive making you fall asleep since you’d probably end up being a nice meal! In this example, the arousal system prevents sleep from happening in order to protect us.

Sleep restriction involves allotting an appropriate amount of time for sleep, based on how much sleep you currently get on an average night, and using this to set yourself an earliest possible bedtime and a consistent final out of bed time. The result is the generation of more sleep drive (this helps overpower the arousal system) and less arousal — because you will start to spend less time awake during the night.

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In effect, the more time we spend in bed asleep rather than awake, the more we associate the bed with sleep rather than wakefulness. When we associate the bed with sleep rather than wakefulness, our brain learns that the bed isn’t a threat and this can further weaken the arousal system.

As the quality of our sleep improves, we usually start to feel better during the day, we start to regain confidence in our natural ability to sleep, we might start to worry a little bit less about sleep — and this is when we often start to see sleep duration increase, even though we started this whole process by allotting less time for sleep.

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My name is Martin Reed and I am the founder of Insomnia Coach®. I offer sleep coaching services that give people with insomnia all the skills and support they need to enjoy better sleep for the rest of their lives. I also offer a free two-week sleep training course for people with insomnia at https://insomniacoach.com/sleep-train...

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