Overcome Insomnia: Good & Bad Advice

The first thing most people do when they develop insomnia is go online and search for how to overcome it. What they find is mostly WRONG advice. They try using the advice and find that it doesn’t work, and they become more anxious, frustrated and hopeless.

I fell into this trap when I had insomnia. Today we go online together, totally spontaneous, and look at what comes up when I search for “How to overcome insomnia.”

Then I tell you what is GOOD or BAD advice and why, and what is the ONE thing you need to do to overcome insomnia.

BAD ADVICE: Things that won’t get rid of insomnia

• Sleep Hygiene

• Exercise

• Meditation/Relaxation Exercises

• Light Exposure

• Diet changes

• Stop Caffeine & Alcohol

• Make your bedroom cool, dark and quiet

GOOD ADVICE: The one thing that will get rid of insomnia

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I)

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WHAT I DO:
I help people overcome insomnia and get good sleep (without medication, drugs or supplements).

To Your Sleeping Better!
- Steve

RESOURCES
CBT-I Playlist

00:00 Introduction to Insomnia and Common Misconceptions
00:43 Live Search: Exploring Online Advice
02:09 Critiquing WebMD's Insomnia Remedies
05:32 Analyzing Mayo Clinic's Recommendations
07:05 Debunking Healthline's Quick Fixes
11:53 Reviewing National Institute of Health Guidelines
14:41 Summary and Effective Treatment: CBT-I
19:53 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

TRANSCRIPT
Introduction to Insomnia and Common Misconceptions

When someone has insomnia, the first thing they usually do is they go online on the Internet, and they do a search for how to overcome insomnia or the cure for insomnia.

And what they find is advice that's wrong. Advice that's misleading. And they take this advice because it's on the internet and it's on reputable websites that you would think you could trust.

And then what people do is they start trying to do those things that are recommended by these different websites. And those things lead them to do the wrong things that don't work, which only makes the problem worse for the insomnia.

They get more discouraged, more anxious, more hopeless that they'll be able to overcome it because they're trying all these things that they're being told to do by the internet and by trusted websites. And it's not working.

Live Search: Exploring Online Advice

So, I thought what I'd do today is just spontaneously, we're going to go online together. I haven't pre planned this, and I'm going to do a search, a search that you might've done many times and that most people do when they develop insomnia to figure out, well, how do I overcome this thing? How do I get rid of insomnia? And I [00:01:00] just want to see what comes up.

And then what we're websites, the top things that come up and look at, what did they recommend for overcoming insomnia? And then I'm going to criticize it. I'm going to say this is good advice or this is bad advice.

And I think this is going to be really helpful for you because this is what keeps people stuck is they go to these websites that they trust and they're misled with the wrong information.

My name is Dr. Steve Orma. I'm a clinical psychologist and I'm a specialist in insomnia and anxiety. And I help people overcome insomnia, get their sleep back, and be able to do that without taking any medication, supplements, sleep hygiene or any of that stuff.

So, I'm online here. I opened up an incognito window because I don't want the information that comes up to be biased toward what I normally search.

What we're going to do here then is I'm just going to put in what a typical person might do when they develop insomnia to try to get information or guidance on the internet.

So they might type in, you know, how to overcome [00:02:00] insomnia. Okay, so right here already you could see there's a lot of advice here. Most of this or all of this is wrong. But let's just go into some specific websites here.

Critiquing WebMD's Insomnia Remedies

The first website, which is WebMD that comes up is five remedies for insomnia to help you sleep better. Okay, let's click on this.

Right, so remedies for insomnia. Exercise. Okay, so the first thing that comes up here is exercise. Exercise is what's considered part of sleep hygiene. And exercise does not get rid of insomnia.

I've talked about many times how insomnia, once you develop it, anything sleep hygiene related, like exercise, isn't going to get rid of the insomnia.

Exercise is great. You know it's great for your overall health, but it's not going to solve the insomnia. Okay, so this is the very first piece of advice that WebMD has for remedying insomnia. Okay, WebMD arguably is the most popular, certainly one of the most popular health websites on the internet.

And so when people go to this and they see that, [00:03:00] they trust it because WebMD is very popular and, and, you know, it's the first thing that comes up in the search. But the very first piece of advice they give is, is wrong

Sleep hygiene. Okay, sleep hygiene is the more general term, and that would include things like, you know, avoid napping during the day, or don't drink caffeine, or don't drink alcohol, get light exposure every day.

Okay, these are all sleep hygiene things, and they also do absolutely nothing for insomnia.

What else do we have? Nutrition. Okay, so changing your diet. This also does nothing for insomnia. Now they're including caffeine and alcohol here. Drinking warm milk or bananas, or tea before bedtime.

Is this good for you? You know, for your overall health? Yeah, perhaps it's good for your overall health to do some of this stuff, but it does absolutely nothing for insomnia, but frustrate you.

So what happens is people come on a website like WebMD and they'll see exercise. Oh, I better start exercising or I'll just increase my exercise. Or they'll try all these sleep hygiene techniques. [00:04:00] Or they'll change their diet and they'll start drinking tea at night or they'll get, stop drinking coffee and alcohol, and then it does nothing for the insomnia.

And all it does then is shoot your anxiety up through the roof and it makes you more discouraged and it makes you think that the insomnia is a bigger problem because all these things that you're trying to do that's being recommended isn't working.

Again, light regulation, get light exposure. They even sell these things called light boxes. You know, if you live in a, in a climate that doesn't get a lot of light, you can get these boxes that just emanate light. And you, in the morning you sit in front of them for 30 minutes and they're supposed to help you get past insomnia, but they don't do that.

They might help with regulation of your circadian rhythm, but they're not going to help with the insomnia.

What else do we have? Relaxation. Okay, so relaxation is a part of the treatment for insomnia, which is CBT. I'll talk about that more at the end, the gold standard treatment, but it's not the key part.

In fact, you could do no relaxation meditation types of exercises and still overcome [00:05:00] insomnia because it's not the key skill that gets rid of insomnia.

I am going to before the end of the video or if we actually see it on one of these websites talk about what you should do. What is good advice to overcome insomnia?

When to see a doctor. So then what happens is it says when to see a doctor. Well, if you've tried these remedies, right? All these remedies that don't work, go see your doctor. So then you're going to end up going to see your doctor, which is many people do. And what will a doctor do? Well, they'll recommend either the same kind of stuff that you already see here, or they'll recommend medication.

So let's, let's try another website.

Analyzing Mayo Clinic's Recommendations

Okay, here's the Mayo Clinic. This is number two that comes up. This is just, I guess, general diagnosis and things like that. So let's just go to treatment. Okay. Now, this is great. CBT for insomnia. So the very first thing that the Mayo CBT for insomnia or CBT I, which I talk about a lot on this channel, and this is the gold standard treatment for insomnia.

So I'm happy to see that You know, at least this website, the Mayo Clinic is recommending it and [00:06:00] partly, I think that's because the CBTI was partly developed at places like the Mayo Clinic. This is the main treatment they would use if you went to a place like the Mayo Clinic. And so they are actually recommending the, the top treatment, which is CBTI.

And I'll talk about that more later. And then they go into like what's involved in CBTI.

But then they still go to prescription medications. And this is something that really frustrates me when I see this, is that medication, if you have CBTI, you don't really need the medication because the medication doesn't address the core problem, which is poor sleep behaviors and negative sleep thoughts, worries that you're having about your sleep.

And medication doesn't address that. It's a short term way. to sedate you taking a medication, but it's not going to cure the insomnia.

So unfortunately, even places like the Mayo Clinic, which are recommending the right treatment will also many times recommend medication.

Let's see, what else do we have? Sleep aids. Yeah, again, this is just, you know, another form of, of medication, antihistamines or over the counter [00:07:00] medications like NyQuil or ZQuil, things like that.

Okay, let's see. What else can we find here?

Debunking Healthline's Quick Fixes

Okay, here's Healthline. How to cure insomnia in 12 minutes. 8 tricks to try tonight. Healthline, another top health website on the internet.

Now this title right here. Oh look, that's interesting. This title is different than the teaser title here. Okay. So this is very misleading. How to cure insomnia in 12 minutes. If you see a headline like that, then run because that is basically BS. You cannot cure insomnia in 12 minutes.

If that was true. There wouldn't be, you know, tens of millions of people or really hundreds of millions of people around the world that are dealing with insomnia and suffering with this for months or years if you could just get rid of it in 12 minutes. There is no trick to just get rid of it in 12 minutes.

There is a great treatment. But it takes longer than 12 minutes. So this is very misleading and only to get you to click.

And then when you click, they change the title. It's like a bait and switch kind of thing. Okay, how to fight [00:08:00] insomnia and fall asleep fast.

Let's see what, oh, here's the 12 minutes.

Want to know how to fall asleep in 12 minutes or less? Okay. Focus on your breath.

Now, if you don't have insomnia, focusing on your breath could be a good thing because you don't have what's called hyperarousal. Hyperarousal is that really alert feeling that you get when you have insomnia that when you get into bed, even though you're exhausted, all of a sudden you become very alert and awake.

And that is a part of insomnia that gets triggered automatically when you get into the bed sometimes or when you're trying to fall asleep or go back to sleep.

And focusing on your breath generally isn't going to work. It might work sometimes, but most often it's not going to because when you're in a hyper aroused state, You can't just relax by focusing on your breath. This is why the meditation or relaxation exercises doesn't really get rid of insomnia because it can't counteract the hyper arousal, that response that your body is in sort of overdrive generating adrenaline to keep you awake when you don't want to be awake.

This will only frustrate you. [00:09:00] And usually make you feel like, oh, you're doing it wrong, or you should try harder. There's something wrong with you because you're focusing on your breath and it's not working. So this is not good advice.

Finding some peace and quiet. Well, yes, but this is a sleep hygiene thing. One part of sleep hygiene is making your environment quiet, dark, and cold.

Now that's good, those are the best conditions for sleep, but you could have the perfectly quiet environment, totally dark, you have blackout shades, you're wearing a sleep mask. And it's cold in the room. You got the air conditioner fan going and you still are lying there wide awake because of that hyper arousal and because of the physiological part of insomnia.

So this again is not going to get rid of the insomnia. It's just going to frustrate you more.

Okay, this is another really popular one. Take a blue light break. Okay, blue light, which is the light that's emanated from a computer or a tablet or your phone. Yes, it's more stimulating than other kinds of light, but stopping the blue light is not going to get rid of [00:10:00] insomnia or getting those glasses that people buy.

And, don't feel bad if you're doing these things, because, everybody does these things. I did these things when I had insomnia. because I thought this is what everybody's telling you to do and I tried all these things and they didn't work and they frustrated me until I found the right treatment.

But I wanted to do this because I want you to know what not to do if you're trying all these things so you don't waste your time, so you don't get frustrated and hopeless and that you can just do the one thing that's the right thing to do to get rid of insomnia.

Read a book or a magazine. Yes, in the right context, there's a skill in CBTI where you do read a book or a magazine that can be part of it, but you're doing it in a certain way. You're not in the bed and it has to be done within the context of the full treatment.

But just sitting in bed, reading a book or magazine generally isn't going to help.

Again, herbal tea. We saw that already. Get comfortable.

Melatonin. Okay. This is within the category of supplements or herbal remedies also doesn't work. Your body already generates [00:11:00] melatonin. It's part of your physiology. It's part of the circadian rhythm that when the sun starts going down each day, your body starts to, like shifts start to happen in your body. Your body temperature starts to go down and your body starts to release melatonin.

But melatonin is not like a sleeping pill. It's just to trigger physiologically in your body to start going through certain physiological changes that a few hours later will put you into the mode better for sleep.

So this does not work to take a supplement of melatonin unless you are older, 60s, 70s maybe because as we get older the melatonin production goes down or it can go down.

But if you're younger than that, it's going to do absolutely nothing other than create a placebo effect. But it's not going to cure the insomnia because if it did, you wouldn't have any insomnia if you're taking melatonin.

Over the counter medication. Okay, so these are all the things we've already seen on the other websites. Not good advice.

What else do we have here?

Reviewing National Institute of Health Guidelines

Okay, this is the National Institute of Health. Okay, so this is the U. S. government's website for [00:12:00] health. Let's see what they recommend.

First advice here, this is all sleep hygiene. All the stuff that does not work for insomnia that we already went over. Alcohol, caffeine, making your bedroom comfortable, avoiding naps. None of that stuff works.

Here we go. Okay, so this is great. National Institute of Health. Now this makes sense because, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia, this is the gold standard treatment which I'm going to talk about, is the first line treatment recommended by the National Institute of Health as well as many other national organizations like the National Sleep Foundation.

So it's good that they're recommending this, but again, they throw in medicines.

What happens is these websites sometimes will recommend the right treatment, but it's mixed in. It's sort of hidden within all these other things they're recommending and it gets lost.

And instead all they should be recommending is this Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia, or CBTI, because it's the gold standard. It's been studied for decades. It's got a very high success rate. It doesn't involve having to take [00:13:00] any medication or supplements. And if you are taking those, it helps you come off of them safely, as you're actually making shifts within your behavior and within your thinking around your sleep.

We have off label medicines. Okay, so this would be things like supplements and over the counter sleep medications.

This is mostly where you're going to see if you go through most websites. These are the top websites that usually come up. WebMD, Mayo Clinic, Healthline, you know, a National Institute of Health.

Basically at this point, we've seen most of the things that people are going to recommend.

Okay, here's the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. Let's see what they say. Okay, good. Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is considered a first line treatment for insomnia. So that's great. I do commend them for saying that. What else do we have CBTI.

I think the challenge is with finding the right treatment is it's mixed in with a lot of things that don't work and those things generally will dominate, [00:14:00] meaning what you'll see more than the right treatment, which is the CBTI, what you'll see more instead of this is the sleep hygiene or the light therapy or exercise or relaxation or things like that that don't work.

And the CBTI gets sort of hidden or lost in all that information because if you don't know anything about this, you don't know how to discern, you know, what's going to work, what's not going to work.

And usually people will default to the things that seem the easiest. And the things that seem the easiest are taking a pill or doing sleep hygiene because it's easier to like, well, I'm going to exercise, you know, 30 minutes a day or I'm going to You know start meditating for 15 minutes every day rather than going through CBTI.

Summary and Effective Treatment: CBT-I

Okay, so I hope you found that helpful. If you're in that mode, if you're searching online, or you're going to doctors, and you're trying to find the right treatment, or you're going to a therapist, or sometimes even a sleep specialist, and you're trying to figure out, you know, what should you do in terms of getting rid of this insomnia, I hope that will help you [00:15:00] prevent you from going down the wrong tracks, or if you already are, which most people do, that you'll realize that the sleep hygiene and taking medication and supplements and things like that are not going to solve the problem.

Okay, now in terms of medication, you definitely want to consult with your physician if you are considering coming off and I'm not telling you to just stop taking your medication, that's not going to be good either because that can make the insomnia worse and you need to be able to come off of it in a certain way that's safe and that doesn't cause what's called rebound insomnia, which makes the insomnia worse.

But the point is that I wanted to educate you so you know that if you are searching online, this is the stuff that you're going to see come up on most website. You're going to see the sleep hygiene and the relaxation and all that kind of stuff. And none of that stuff works. And really the gold standard treatment, the only thing that you want to do or need to do is CBT-I. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia.

Now I've talked about that in detail in many other videos. I'll have a link. I have a whole playlist. [00:16:00] I'll link to that in the show notes below the video so you can watch that if you want to get more detail.

But essentially CBT-I is a very structured treatment that goes over several weeks.

And each week you're learning new skills. And then each week you add new skills and you build. It's like a layered treatment process where you learn a couple things, you apply it to your sleep. The next week you learn a few more, you add that to what you're already doing and you build on that.

And the things that you're doing are focused on two key areas. Changing your behaviors around sleep and changing your thinking around sleep and in particular the behaviors because ultimately it's your sleep behaviors that cause and maintain the insomnia.

And what creates and maintains insomnia is poor sleep behaviors. And poor sleep behaviors are things that you're doing usually to try to help But in actuality will make it worse.

In the short term, it might help a little bit, but in the long term will make it worse. That's things like sleeping in a couple hours because you didn't sleep well. So you're [00:17:00] trying to get some extra sleep. That means going to bed earlier to try to, you know, get more sleep on the front end. So you have a longer time to sleep.

Another poor sleep behavior is when you're not sleeping, you stay in the bed, and you toss and turn for hours, and you're just lying there wide awake in the bed, and you do that over several nights.

So those are some common poor sleep behaviors that over time, create the insomnia. They basically train your body to be awake in the bed instead of sleeping or it's a mixture, right? Usually sometimes you're sleeping and sometimes you're not sleeping because your brain is now confused. Do you want to be sleeping in the bed or do you not want to be sleeping in the bed?

There's also a mental part of this. People develop what are called negative sleep thoughts, which are basically just worries that you don't want to think about. about your sleep or the effects of not sleeping. Oh my God. What's the matter with me? I'm not sleeping anymore. Is there something the matter? Have I lost my ability to sleep? Oh my God. What if I don't sleep well tonight? I'm not going to be able to function tomorrow. I'm going to developed some really bad health problems.

These are all negative sleep thoughts, which create a lot of anxiety and frustration and hopelessness. And those feed the behaviors that I was [00:18:00] talking about, because the more concerned and upset and worried you get about your sleep, The more you're going to desperately try to find solutions.

And that's what leads people to go online or go to their doctor or go to a therapist and ask them, what should I do to solve this? And then usually what they're told are most of the things that I showed you when I did the search online.

And so as a summary of what we saw, the bad advice includes all these things, sleep hygiene, know, stopping caffeine, stopping alcohol, making your environment, you know, cool, dark and comfortable. Exercise, getting light exposure, meditation, yoga, all these kinds of things.

Sure, those are all healthy things to do in general, but they're not going to get rid of the insomnia. And they're just going to make things worse because you're going to get frustrated and more hopeless.

And the good advice when you see it is the CBT-I or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia.

This is what you want to do. This is what I do in my program when I work with my clients. When I had insomnia 10 years ago, [00:19:00] This is the treatment. I put myself through CBT-I and I got rid of my insomnia and I have not had a relapse in 10 years because you learn with CBT-I how to prevent relapse, how to prevent it getting back into insomnia, even when there's a stressor in your life, or you have jet lag, or there's some disturbance to your sleep, which is just normal and natural for life. Everybody has that, but how do you prevent that from turning back into insomnia? You learn that as well. So I've been able to keep insomnia gone for 10 years, and in fact my sleep has continued to improve and improve, once you know the basic principles of what creates good sleep, what allows your body to sleep naturally in the way that it was designed to. So you're not getting in the way, which is kind of what happens with insomnia. We get in the way of our own sleep. A lot of times by doing those things that are recommended that we saw when I went online.

Okay, so you don't want to do those things. You just want to do the CBT-I.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

And I hope you found this video helpful to keep you from falling into some of those traps and to know what you're doing. The one thing that you [00:20:00] should do if you want to get rid of the insomnia.

If you have any comments or questions, you can post them below in the comments section.

If you found this video helpful, press the like button and you can subscribe to the channel. I do two videos like this every week. And I hope you have a good rest of your week and I'll see you next time.