(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 many other things sleep researchers study, they also study behaviors and interventions that promote sleep.
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. The theory we are developing is called the “somnolent information-processing theory“.
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 affectively laden mental content — problems, issues, concerns, wishes, wants, desires, fears, yearnings, etc.
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 mentation strategies. For example, old techniques such as reading, listening to the radio, and the
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 control treatment.”
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, potentially past the point of it being helpful. It involves repeatedly thinking about the concern,
