As many of you probably already know, insomnia is a sleep disorder.
People who suffer from it experience difficulties to fall asleep and/or unable to remain asleep for a reasonable period.
Having such a poor-quality sleep causes our daily productivity level decreases to lower part.
Why? Because our body system needs a good sleep to function properly, and this is what an insomnia sufferer's body fails to get.
There are many medication treatments available for this matter.
Unfortunately, these options are only effective for short term, and even worse they carry side effects.
For this reason, behavioral treatment becomes the popular choice of treating insomnia, especially for chronic insomnia.
Are you saying that a patient should not consume any medicine at all to cure the insomnia? No, that is not what I mean.
Both the medication and behavior treatment can be prescribed together to help a patient achieves a maximum result.
Medications are provided for helping you to get a good-quality sleep in short term and behavioral methods are applied for giving you a long-term effects.
Despite its effective result, behavioral therapies need practices before you can do them well.
This is where medication takes part by helping you to fall asleep in the beginning sessions of the therapy.
As you practice behavioral methods continuously, eventually you are able to have a good sleep without the help of the medication.
Here are some of the behavioral therapies.
Sleep Restriction People with insomnia tend to take any opportunity to get asleep in daytime as the compensation for their poor night sleep.
In fact I did that since I thought naps would help me, but then I learned that this habit makes my insomnia gets even worse.
What this therapy does is to make a regular sleep-wake schedule in the hope that an insomnia sufferer will be able to fall asleep immediately after going to bed.
To achieve this condition, one of the rules it requires them to do is to refrain from taking naps.
Relaxation Getting physically and mentally relaxed can increase sleep ability and quality.
People often have their own ways to attain the condition.
Some read books, watching television, taking warm bath, others do yoga, and so on.
There are many other relaxation therapies you can try.
Some of them are listed below: Visual imagery relaxation - where is you favorite place when you want to get some peace? what kind of natural situation that can slow you down from your activities? Imagine the place, imagine the situation, imagine that you get the peace, imagine that there is nothing to be worried at the moment, and feel how relax you become.
Progressive muscle relaxation - this is a method where you should tense, hold, and then you completely relax certain muscles.
Stress and anger management - here you learn how to control your emotion, how to let your anger out without doing anything negative, which help you to get relax.
Stimulus control Are you aware that sometimes we somehow can fall asleep much easier in a living room chair than in bed? Most people who suffer from insomnia unaware that one of the many causes of their difficulty with sleep is they unconsciously associate bed with sleeplessness.
Since most of the time it is hard to fall asleep, they become anxious about not being able to get asleep, which gradually shapes a mistaken mindset about bed and sleep.
Stimulus Control is a therapy to re-associate bed with sleep.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy The purpose of this method is to remove the faulty beliefs and behaviors that a lot of insomnia patients typically have about sleep.
An example of such misconception is the belief that everyone must sleep for at least 7 hours to get what our body needs or to get a good sleep.