The treatment that works for insomnia

If you lie awake at night, there is a treatment for it that works better than any pill, lasts after it's stopped, and is recommended first by every major medical guideline. Almost nobody is offered it.

It's called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, CBT-I, and it was built in pieces. In 1972 a psychologist named Richard Bootzin described stimulus control: the bed is for sleep only, so if you're not asleep in twenty minutes, get up, and come back only when sleepy, until the bed means sleep again. In 1993 Charles Morin at Laval University gathered that and two other pieces, sleep restriction and the correction of the anxious thoughts that keep people awake, into a structured program of about six sessions. It's been tested in dozens of trials. Most people who complete it sleep better, and keep sleeping better, without medication.

The counterintuitive core is sleep restriction. If you're spending nine hours in bed and sleeping six, you cut your time in bed to six, same wake time every day, no exceptions. It's miserable for a week. Then the sleep drive builds, you start falling asleep fast, and you gradually earn the time back. The bed stops being a place of anxious waiting and becomes a place where you sleep.

This is an Awareness key because insomnia is mostly a problem of attention: the mind, lying in the dark, watching itself not sleep. CBT-I breaks the watching.

Vault Human points to a CBT-I therapist, or to one of the several validated apps that deliver it, and I'd say this plainly: if sleep is your problem, this is your key, before anything else on the 180.