In the last post I wrote that there are people predisposed to insomnia. For example, those who often react to stress with insomnia: anxiety before difficult flights or exams ➡️ insomnia; you did a great job, you can’t digest the joyful excitement ➡️ insomnia (level I, see the picture below). If such an individual experiences stress for some time or faces crisis situations, his insomnia may drag on (level II, see the picture below). After about 15-20 unsuccessful attempts to fall asleep, a fear of not falling asleep may develop (level III, see the picture below). This can be acute insomnia (up to 3 months with >3 bad nights per week) or chronic (same thing, only lasts >3 months). Fear of not falling asleep and other supporting factors can fuel your insomnia, even if there is less or no “constant stress”, even if the crisis has passed. These factors can disrupt sleep for many years if they are not corrected. What, besides the fear of not falling asleep, can maintain insomnia? • Staying in bed for too long. Since a person cannot sleep, he begins to expect sleepiness in bed while doing other things: scrolling his Instagram feed, working, watching TV series. And thereby strengthens the reflex “a bed is not only a dream” and “a bed = insomnia.”• Disturbance in the perception of sleep is a phenomenon when a person seems to have slept little or not slept at all, but was simply lying in oblivion, but in reality in fact he was sleeping. This can be checked using a sleep tracker.• Irregular sleep schedule: naps during the day, nights without sleep, long naps on weekends, random wake-up and bedtimes.• Increased consumption of caffeine and other energy stimulants.• Insufficient exercise. Or excessive physical activity in the afternoon. • Sleeping outside the bedroom. • Catastrophizing insomnia (“If only I got enough sleep, I wouldn’t have all these problems!”). If supporting factors have formed, then this is the first target in the fight against insomnia. However, an integrated approach will be most effective. Within the framework of the cognitive-behavioral direction, I see 3 components of work - knowledge, behavior, thinking: 1. Sleep Knowledge: general information about sleep physiology, circadian rhythms, and insomnia; exploration of how your insomnia “works.”2. Sleep hygiene + physical activity and nutrition + relaxation techniques. For acute and chronic insomnia, a psychotherapist can also recommend techniques for limiting sleep and controlling stimuli. It's something like this: Let's remember how many hours you needed to sleep. Subtract one hour and get the number of hours you can spend in bed. For example, we get 7 hours. And, let’s say, we choose a sleep schedule from 00:00 to 7:00. ➡️If you go to bed, but after 15-20 minutes you don’t fall asleep, then you get up and go do boring, calming things. When drowsiness sets in, you go to bed. If we couldn’t fall asleep again, then we do the same. The time of awakening does not move forward, since our task is to accumulate a sleep deficit. This helps reduce the time you spend in bed, build a routine, ensure that you fall asleep quickly and deepen your sleep, and also break the association “bed = insomnia.” The technique has its limitations and contraindications, so it is better to select techniques from this category together with a specialist.3. Working with negative beliefs (rumination before bed, beliefs about insomnia itself).❕Attention❕ Insomnia can be both a symptom of a disorder (such as depression or anxiety disorder) and a trigger that starts the disorder. Therefore, it is important to take care of your sleep and contact a specialist if insomnia has dragged on and you can no longer cope with it on your own..