Why sleep restriction is not in this course

If you have read about insomnia treatment properly you will have met sleep restriction, and you might be wondering why it is missing.

It works by cutting your time in bed down to roughly the amount you are actually sleeping, and then letting it back out slowly as the sleep gets solid. It is the most powerful single piece of the real treatment, and it is not being withheld because we think little of it.

It is missing because it works by making you short of sleep on purpose for a while, and for some people that is genuinely dangerous. Bipolar disorder, where lost sleep can tip a person into a manic episode. Epilepsy or any seizure history. Untreated sleep apnoea. Sleepwalking. Anyone who drives for a living or operates machinery. Pregnancy. Shift work, where the whole approach has to be rebuilt.

A clinician screens for all of that in a conversation before they start, and a web page cannot. So we are naming it, telling you why it is not here, and telling you who to ask for it, which is more use to you than pretending it does not exist.