Articles

Suffering from chronic insomnia commonly leads to chronic exhaustion. Or, in my case, periods of hypermania quickly followed up by exhaustion. To address mental and physical fatigue, I recently took...

It's 2:20 AM, and I got in bed 5 hours ago. I was exhausted and really optimistic about getting some decent sleep tonight. I spent a lot of time outside...

Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is an important tool to treat insomnia. But, does online CBT-I work as well as in-person CBT-I? CBT-I includes several different approaches to help...

When I woke up for the fourth time this morning, I knew. I knew the brief period of uninterrupted slumber I was thoroughly enjoying had come to an end. The...

Noise. I need it, and I always have. I am one of those people who needs the television on in the background. I was one of those students who had...

Over the years of struggling to sleep, I've tried shielding my eyes from the light in a variety of fashions. I've done everything from pulling the covers up over my...

Recently, I tragically lost a good friend I became very close friends with for a few years. I never got to see her the last few weeks of her life...

“I’ve been off Ambien for 40 days!”  This is some of the best news I’ve ever received from my mother. As a psychologist who treats insomnia with behavioral interventions, I...

For many of us, insomnia is simply a way of life. There is not always a reason; it simply is just part of our lives – always has been and...

If I had a penny for every time someone asked me, how I cope with insomnia, I would be a very rich woman indeed. So how DO I cope?! The...

I recently moved to my summer home. When I say summer home, I mean my motorhome. I spend most of the summer camping. While my motorhome is quite comfortable, adjusting...

I’ll be blunt: I wish you didn’t use sleep medications to treat your insomnia. I wish I could convince you to get behavioral treatment instead. If I knew you personally, I’d nag...

My husband is the most kind, compassionate, understanding person I've ever met. My husband is also unable to change the reality of my life with insomnia. Let me explain. In...

EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapy has 8 phases: These phases are not all timed specifically nor are they all timed equally. Meaning, if a patient is struggling with...

I am someone who has struggled with insomnia for as long as I can remember. Which means, I've talked to a lot of different doctors and health care providers about...

A lot of people with insomnia get upset by being awake at night. One of the key components of cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia is actually to use that time...

The search box is a funny thing. I always get a little laugh out of the random assortment of things auto-filling Google's address bar as I begin to type. Teaching...

Is there such a thing as an ideal bedtime? Or is there an optimal quantity and quality of sleep that each person needs each night? There is no single answer...

In the first part of this article, I wrote about how insomnia affects other aspects of my life. Unfortunately, the ripple effects are visible to me every day. Insomnia causes...

Perhaps I should not describe people like this as friends. I suppose they are more acquaintances because I am not referring to people close to me. I am talking about...