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SleepFor yourself45 min read

Getting your sleep back: the Psychotip® programme

Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, recommended ahead of any sleeping pill. The principle is explained in the opening pages, then put to work in eight steps: diary, calculation, precautions, sleep window, stimulus control, weekly adjustments, sleep effort, stabilisation.

In short

This programme is for someone who has slept badly for months. It applies cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia — CBT-I — which sleep societies place first-line, ahead of medication. It comes in four parts: understanding the mechanism, following an eight-step programme, getting past the obstacles, and dealing with everything around it — sleeping pills, melatonin, what is not insomnia.

Topic
Sleep
Who it's for
For yourself
Languages
FR · EN · DE · IT · ES · ZH · AR

Français · English · Deutsch · Italiano · Español · 中文 · العربية

The programme

This programme supports treatment; it does not replace it. Restricting time in bed, which is its core, produces marked sleepiness for one to two weeks: it is not advised without medical advice if you drive a great deal, if you operate machinery, if you have a history of bipolar disorder or epilepsy, during pregnancy, or if you already have significant daytime sleepiness — step 3 is devoted to this. Never change a sleeping pill on your own initiative: abrupt discontinuation causes rebound insomnia and, for some molecules, severe effects. And if you snore heavily, if breathing pauses have been observed during your sleep, or if you fall asleep during the day despite apparently normal nights, have that investigated before starting: it is probably not insomnia.

1. Before you start

You go to bed exhausted and you are wide awake the moment the light goes out. Or you fall asleep easily and open your eyes at 3.20 a.m., for good. You know your bedroom ceiling. You calculate: "if I fall asleep now, I have four hours left". You go to bed earlier to catch up, you stay in bed later at weekends, you nap when you can — and nothing improves, sometimes the opposite.

This programme is made for that situation. It applies cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, CBT-I, which is the first-line treatment for chronic insomnia in adults — recommended ahead of sleeping pills by sleep societies in Europe and in the United States.

The rest is for members

Create your access to read this programme in full, along with every other resource.

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Printable worksheets

The exercises from this programme, as printable PDFs. Members only.

See the plansThe printable worksheets are included with access.
  1. 01The sleep diaryStep 1 — seven nights, changing nothing. Reprint every week of the programme.
  2. 02Calculating my sleep efficiencyStep 2 — two numbers, ten minutes. They are the only ones you will need.
  3. 03The precautions before restrictingStep 3 — five minutes, and it does not get skipped.
  4. 04My sleep windowStep 4 — the core of the treatment. Put it up where you will see it in the evening.
  5. 05Stimulus controlStep 5 — install on the same day as sheet 4. Keep it near the bed.
  6. 06The adjustment tableStep 6 — ten minutes every Sunday, and a single rule.
  7. 07Sleep effort and worry timeStep 7 — to add from the third week onwards.
  8. 08Stabilising and my relapse planStep 8 — one page, written now, to reread in six months.

Every worksheet in one file, with a table of contents.

insomniasleepCBT-Isleep restrictionsleeping pills

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