Written and reviewed by a Registered Clinical Counsellor
Guides to Sleep, Insomnia, and CBT-I
A collection of guides and articles that give you the closest thing you can get to doing CBT-I, without actually doing CBT-I.
Graeme Thompson, RCC ·MA Counselling Psychology ·CBT-I Certified ·BCACC #21951
- Registered Clinical Counsellor
- Written for British Columbia
- Primary sources linked
- No affiliate links, ever
Yoga nidra and NSDR are the same practice, and one trial has compared it directly to CBT-I. Here's what the evidence actually shows, a full five-step protocol, and how to use it to get through the hardest week of sleep restriction without undermining your sleep drive.
Sleep restriction dosing, misperception detection, and week-to-week treatment adjustments all come from one source: the sleep diary. Wearables can't substitute for it, though researchers are exploring how objective data might complement it. Here's why tracking is structural to CBT-I, not preliminary to it.
Melatonin is a chronobiotic, not a sedative, which is why the evidence for chronic insomnia is weak. It helps most for circadian misalignment, with light exposure as the foundation and melatonin as an adjunct. For arousal-driven insomnia, CBT-I addresses the cause.
Wildfire smoke can wreck a night of sleep by irritating your airway. It is a poor explanation for insomnia that has run for months. A BC-specific look at acute smoke events versus prolonged moderate exposure, what to change in the bedroom, and where CBT-I actually fits into a smoke season.
A circadian rhythm disorder is a problem with the timing of sleep rather than
the capacity for it. This guide covers how delayed and advanced sleep-wake
phase disorders differ from insomnia disorder, why the two so often run
together, how light and melatonin timing works, and how assessment happens in
British Columbia.
A famous sleep deprivation case is often used as reassurance that sleep debt is easy to repay. The medic who monitored it, the man's own later account, and decades of sleep research since all tell a more complicated and more useful story about recovery.
Caffeine, alcohol, and late meals disrupt sleep more than most advice admits. See what the research says about diet and sleep, and where CBT-I fits in.
Most SAD lamp guides are affiliate rankings or generic clinical checklists. This one bridges the two: what to check before buying, what to avoid on Amazon, morning versus evening timing for insomnia, and three specific devices that meet the criteria, with no compensation involved anywhere.
Insomnia affects roughly 60% of autistic adults. That rate isn't coincidental. It reflects a nervous system with a lower threshold for arousal, a circadian clock that's harder to keep on schedule, and a maintaining cycle that sleep hygiene can't touch. Here's what's driving it, and where CBT-I fits in.
It's 3:17 a.m. You know because you just checked. Now the arithmetic starts. Clock-watching doesn't just reflect insomnia — research shows it makes it worse, warps your sense of how long you've been awake, and drives sleep medication use. Here's why it's hard to stop, and what CBT-I does about it.
The thoughts that keep you awake at 2am rarely get questioned. This CBT-I guide adapts Socratic questioning to insomnia: eight questions to test a sleep thought against the evidence, how to rewrite it without promising sleep, and why it belongs in daylight.
It's 11:20pm and the thought arrives fully formed: tonight is going to be another bad one. It feels like a forecast, not a guess. Cognitive defusion is the skill of unhooking from that thought so it carries less weight, and the research behind it is stronger than you might expect. Here are ten techniques drawn from ACT, popular books, and everyday practice, with guidance on choosing the few worth keeping.