Sleep restriction for chronic insomnia is helpful because it helps address a common behavior that perpetuates sleep disruption — spending too much time in bed.

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Allotting a more appropriate amount of time for sleep also helps build sleep drive — the urge or drive to sleep the gets stronger the longer we remain awake. For this reason, many clients think this technique would only be helpful if their challenge is falling asleep at the start of the night since the simple act of going to bed later can help build sleep pressure and make falling asleep a bit easier.

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Sleep restriction, however, is helpful for chronic insomnia in all its forms — and that’s because it helps tackle the three factors that perpetuate sleep disruption: low sleep drive, body clock disruption, and arousal.

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Most logically, perhaps, we can recognize that allotting less time for sleep will mean more time spent awake — and that will build sleep drive. Sleep drive can really help with falling asleep at the start of the night, but a strong sleep drive can also help with nighttime awakenings — especially when they occur earlier in the night — since if we are still really sleepy when we wake, it can make falling back to sleep a lot easier.

Implementing sleep restriction by observing a consistent and appropriate sleep window can help strengthen the body clock, too. Since your sleep window ends at the same time each day, you give your body a consistent morning anchor and this helps it better regulate sleep and wakefulness. If we get out of bed at wildly different times each day, our body clock can struggle to regulate itself – it might end up sending wake signals through the body when we want to be asleep (for example, during the night!) and allowing sleep signals to take over when we want to be awake.

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Finally, sleep restriction can help address arousal since — by default — it provides us with less opportunity for extended periods of nighttime wakefulness (because we are allotting less time for sleep). As a result, we help tackle conditioned arousal by creating a stronger association between the bed and sleep (rather than unpleasant wakefulness) and we help tackle cognitive arousal (the sleeprelated thoughts and worries that might be making sleep more difficult) since there’s less time available for the mental rumination that might be happening at night. Furthermore, as we start to spend less time awake during the night, we usually experience better sleep quality and this can lead to less sleeprelated worry.

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My name is Martin Reed and I am the founder of Insomnia Coach®. I offer sleep coaching services that give people with insomnia all the skills and support they need to enjoy better sleep for the rest of their lives. I also offer a free twoweek sleep training course for people with insomnia at https://insomniacoach.com/sleeptrain...

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