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Reality testing for insomnia
It's understood among experts that insomnia is largely subjective. Studies usually show at most a little sleep loss in insomniac patients; the problem is not how little sleep they get but how little sleep they think they get. In a new experiment, researchers have tested the effect of providing objective sleep information directly to the insomniacs themselves.
Forty people complaining of insomnia were asked to keep a sleep diary for three nights while wearing a wrist- watch-like device called an actigraph to distinguish the waking from the sleeping state. The actigraph, which records body movements, generally gives the same results as standard sleep laboratory physiological and brain wave measurements. After three nights, half of the subjects were shown the actigraph results and half were not. Then they all spent three more nights wearing the actigraph and keeping the sleep diary.
After the first three nights, subjects on average overestimated their sleep latency (the time needed to fall asleep) by 37 minutes and underestimated their total sleep time by 46 minutes. The actigraphs showed an average sleep time of 7.2 hours and average sleep latency of 24 minutes, both within the normal range.
During the experiment, objective sleep latency and objective sleep time did not change. At the conclusion, both groups of subjects felt less anxious about their sleep, but the effect was greater in those who had seen the reassuring actigraph results. The actigraph group also estimated their sleep latency more accurately. So simply keeping the diary apparently helped, but feedback on the actual length of sleep had an independent therapeutic effect.
Tang NKY, et al. "Correcting Distorted Perception of Sleep in Insomnia: A Novel Behavioural Experiment," Behaviour Research and Therapy (2004): Vol 42, No. 1, pp. 27-39.
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| Last updated: | August 21, 2006 |
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