(How) can bedtime thinking affect falling asleep? We’ve created the infographic (below) to help you quickly grasp our recent paper, “Pre-sleep cognitive activity in adults: A systematic review” (published earlier this month in Sleep Medicine Reviews).

Media and researchers alike often focus on the dark side of sleep: that (and why) we don’t get enough sleep, and that sleep deprivation has significant adverse impacts on biological and mental health, well-being, productivity and error rates.  Amongst the …

Good ‘news’ about Sleep Promotion Read more »

There are several big ideas behind mySleepButton’s current and upcoming cognitive shuffle packs (as well as DIY versions). I’ve written some papers about these ideas before, and am currently co-authoring a new paper with Célyne H. Bastien on the subject. …

Making Sense of the Cognitive Shuffle Read more »

My colleagues and I recently published a paper that provides one of the essential concepts for understanding insomnia and a host of other constructive, banal, and problematic mental states. The concept is perturbance, which is a persistent tendency to consider …

Perturbance: An Important Concept for Understanding “Racing Minds” and Other Forms of Repetitive Thinking Read more »

Researchers at the University of Montreal will present a paper in Montreal comparing the cognitive shuffle with backward counting. This research was undertaken for several reasons, one of which is that insomnia research has to date assessed surprisingly few deliberate …

Preliminary Results of a Study Comparing The Cognitive Shuffle with Backward Counting (Like “Counting Sheep”) Read more »

On Wednesday of last week, the journal “SLEEP” published the “longest controlled follow-up of CBT-i thus far.” The report found that CBT-i (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia) “reduced use of sleep medications and other additional insomnia treatments, compared to a …

More Support for the Advantage of CBT for Treating Insomnia Read more »

In this blog post, I examine one of the most common psychological reasons why people can’t fall asleep: Rumination. And I discuss what you can do about it. Ruminating means to persist in hashing out a concern in one’s head, …

Why Ruminating Delays Sleep. And How to Stop Ruminating at Bedtime Read more »