Hi there it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast and this next installment in

the mini-series all about insomnia. Today and in the next episode and the next

episode will be the final episode in this series we're going to discuss the

primary approach that is currently taken to addressing insomnia.

And that is a non-drug approach that we call cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia or CBTI for short.

But before speaking about the treatment that is effective for insomnia which is

CBTI I think it's worth mentioning the things that are not effective the things that do

not work for patients with insomnia.

Many of these things, these things that don't work, are very understandable aspects that people will turn to when they start

trying to self-medicate their insomnia and sadly they are only making matters worse for themselves.

The most commonly used sleep aid, and I'm using, I'm sort of, you can't see me, but I'm doing

my inverted commas in terms of fingers and sleep aid is alcohol

and it is anything but a sleep aid and many patients with insomnia will have two or three night caps in the evening before bed to try to help them fall asleep.

But as we've mentioned in previous episodes, alcohol will hurt your sleep in at least three different ways.

First, we know that alcohol is a sedative and sedation is not natural sleep.

So what happens with people with insomnia as the having a couple of drinks in the evening because

they know they quote-unquote

need it to fall asleep. It's not that they're falling asleep faster. What they're doing

is just knocking out their cortex and sedating their brain and losing consciousness more quickly.

That's not naturalistic sleep.

The second aspect of alcohol is that it's going to fragment your sleep.

So insomnia patients already have problems with waking up in the middle of the night and not

...