Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia - Stimulus Control and Cognitive Control

(This video is part 4 of 6: for other videos in this series about CBT for Insomnia, scroll down to the end of this blog post)

Today’s topic is a bit more complex as I’ll be covering two additional parts of the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia treatment plan. I wanted to talk about both of these in the same video simply because they are so closely linked in my work as well. 

In my sleep coaching practice, I use behavioural therapy but in a more practical and personalised way than most of the general resources you might have already seen. This is why you’ll hear me explain things in more practical ways, rather than purely scientific ways.

In the first part of today’s, video I’ll talk about Stimulus Control. I’ll walk you through what it means and how I use it in my practice to help clients overcome long-term insomnia and sleep problems. This part of helping people is a really interesting part for sure, mainly because every client I worked with in the past has had a slightly different combination of struggles and what helped them to improve their sleep. 

We’re all different human beings, so anything to do with behavioural therapy has to include some personalisation. Otherwise, general tips, advice or approaches will not help you to tailor things to the root cause of your sleep problems.

The second part of today’s video is about Cognitive Control. I’ll talk about what this means in relation to insomnia and sleep problems and how I use this part of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to help clients. We live in a world where so many people like you are told to ‘control’ their thoughts or their behaviour, and there is so much negativity around not doing things ‘right’ or even ‘perfectly’.

So the way I use this principle of Cognitive Control (and I don’t call it control for obvious reasons) is to help clients make the most of their thoughts and behaviours to support them. Whatever habit, behaviour or thought patterns we look at, a simple tweak is enough to turn them into useful resources instead of letting them cause havoc in our lives. 

I’m sure that the examples I gave and the practical ways I explained these to parts will help you look at your sleep situations and integrate these in small ways, to begin with.

Beatrix

Part 1 of the Cognitive Behaviour Therapy video series: Practical Sleep Education - click here to watch video one

Part 2 of the Cognitive Behaviour Therapy video series: Practical Sleep Hygiene - click here to watch video two

Part 3 of the Cognitive Behaviour Therapy video series: Practical 'Sleep Restriction' - click here to watch video three

Part 5 of the Cognitive Behaviour Therapy video series: Thought Control, Thought Distraction, Paradoxical Intention - click here to watch video five

Part 6 of the Cognitive Behaviour Therapy video series: How to deal with 'dysfunctional' beliefs - click here to watch video six