Session 3
Welcome to week 3 of the programme!
The session of this week will be online and therapist guided. Normally, you should have received an email with a link to join an online Teams meeting with your therapist. During this session, you and your therapist will go over your sleep journal, your wind down routine, the stimulus control techniques and the changes you might have implemented already. Together with your therapist, you will set-up a new sleep plan which will be tailored to you. You will also have plenty of opportunities to ask questions and share your concerns. Below you can find some information of certain topics that will be discussed during session 3.
Sleep Efficiency: What is it and how do we calculate it?
If you did not receive your appointment yet, please contact SleepPainStudy@warwick.ac.uk .
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- Practice the new sleep plan that you developed/will develop with your therapist.
- Remind yourself regularly of the stimulus control therapy and sleep hygiene guidelines to continue re-training your brain to associate sleep with your bedroom and dissociate it with other unhelpful habits.
Sleep restriction therapy should be used with a few Stimulus Control Therapy (SCT) principles, to retrain your brain to associate sleep with your bedroom and dissociate it with other unhelpful habits.
You will probably get less sleep than usual in the first few weeks. And that’s normal. This will result in a build-up of sleepiness and help you to fall asleep more quickly after a few nights to a week.
sleep restriction therapy and start applying it alongside a review of your sleep diaries, selection of new times for going to bed and getting up, and discussion of any challenges or helpful factors to starting and carrying out your new sleep plan. In the following three sessions with your therapist, you will review progress, troubleshoot any difficulties, and work on adapting your sleep schedule.
We now ask you to take a good look at your sleep diary you have completed so far and try to think about your own sleep patterns. To understand more what your current patterns look like, just look at these two sleep patterns and identify which represents your current sleep pattern. Think about what usually fills the gaps between periods of being asleep? Perhaps emotions such as anger or frustration? Worries and unwanted thoughts?
Which sleep pattern do you prefer? Which pattern in your opinion is likely to have higher sleep quality?
Both sleep patterns have the same overall amount of sleep. Sleep pattern A is when this amount of sleep is spread over a longer duration, resulting in fragmented and low-quality sleep. In fact, going to bed early and before our biological clock is ready to call it a night, and spending a lot of time laying in bed awake can weaken our sleep pressure, resulting in sleep spreading thinly across the night. On the other hand, staying up for longer before trying to sleep, increases our sleep drive until we reach our optimal sleep gate, which can then result in it taking less time to get to sleep and more deep sleep. This results in overall shorter but continuous sleep similar to pattern B.
Last week we discussed sleep homeostasis, and how it regulates our need to sleep with our need to be awake. Accordingly, in this programme, the changes we are going to suggest are about working with your sleep homeostasis and helping you shift your sleep pattern from A to B to achieve a better sleep experience. It is about compressing your sleep, not reducing it. It is about increasing your sleep efficiency. When the sleep pressure is high, sleep onset becomes easy and you will tend to get better quality sleep after a sustained period of sleep deprivation.