Eduardo Amorim via Compfight
This will be post one in a program aimed to cure your insomnia, not just to treat it.
Our target is six weeks.
Posts will come every Monday and Thursday, so if you want to keep up just subscribe at the bottom of this post – you’ll get all the updates as they happen.
The Setup
Each post will be a technique in and of itself (stand-alone as it were) to try and take you from sleepless to rested. But before we start there is an important precondition.
The very first thing we need to assure is that you have insomnia!
The definition of insomnia is either
- Having difficulty getting to sleep – anything more than about twenty minutes is considered difficulty
- Having trouble staying asleep – if you wake up in the middle of the night and are awake for more than a couple of minutes, then you have a sleep maintenance issue
If you fit into one (or both) of these categories, then you have insomnia. But we need to make sure that the reason you’re not sleeping isn’t related to some other factor.
Insomnia caused by some other source is called secondary, or co-morbid insomnia. This is often as simple as a cup of coffee too late in the day, excessive snoring during the night (one of the common symptoms of sleep apnea), or pain in the joints preventing you from sleeping.
Before we embark on this program, you should take all the steps you can to eliminate these other potential causes of insomnia. Often the best person to ask is your doctor – almost all of these causes can be controlled or eliminated. When the problem is addressed, the insomnia tends to go away.
It would be silly to go through all the steps I’m about to describe just to eventually find out that you can’t have coffee after lunch because it causes you to not sleep.
So, once you’ve confirmed that there is no medical, psychiatric or environmental cause to your insomnia, we can continue.
Step One is to confirm that you have primary insomnia.
See you in three days with Step Two.
