Suffer From Insomnia? Best Insomnia Drug Is Not A Drug, But Rather Cognitive Behavioral Therapy According to Consumer Reports

Do you suffer from insomnia? Have you tried sleeping pills? When a major consumer ratings agency such as Consumer Reports endorses cognitive behavioral therapy over drug treatment for insomnia, it is big news.sleeping dog

In the May 2017 issue of Consumer Reports (CR), there is an article entitled Why the Best Insomnia Treatment Is Not a Drug.  In earlier versions of their articles on sleep and medications for sleep they had reviewed various different sleeping agents but in this updated article they conclude that at best, the newer sleep medications add only between eight and 20 minutes of sleep time, and don’t improve how people feel or operate the next day.

They also reviewed a recent systematic research study by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) that compared multiple treatments for sleep problems including drugs, cognitive behavioral therapy, and alternative therapies. This study concluded that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a safe and effective way to treat insomnia, and is more effective and safer than other treatments.

So Consumer Reports’ Best Buy drug pick is actually not a drug at all! It is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). They recommend at least one session and optimally suggest three to six  sessions of CBT with a psychologist.

They also have a good description of how CBT works for insomnia. They explain how you meet with a psychologist and work on changing your beliefs about sleep, as well as changing certain behaviors that may contribute to insomnia. CR also includes a concise chart about bad sleep habits and how to fix them. They have an excellent description of CBT for insomnia here.  If CBT was a sleep medication, promoted by a powerful drug company, it would be a multibillion-dollar product!

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I have previously written about CBT for the treatment of insomnia in the article Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) Outperforms Drugs for Insomnia,   Want to Sleep Better? Get Brief CBT-I Therapy for Sleep Instead of Sleeping Pills, and Good News! You May Be Getting More Sleep Than You Think, Especially If You Suffer Insomnia! so I will just summarize some of the conclusions from those articles.

The bottom line for these articles was that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for insomnia was safe, effective and long-lasting in its effects. What is clear from virtually every study of sleep treatments is that CBT may be the only treatment for sleep problems that doesn’t have side effects and negative impacts into the next day. According to a 2015 Consumer Report survey, 36% of people who took a sleeping pill felt drowsy the next day. They also report a study of 410,000 adults published in the American Journal of Public health which found that those who took sleeping pills were twice as likely to be in automobile crashes. The researchers in this study concluded that people taking sleep medications were as likely to have car accidents as people with blood-alcohol levels above the legal limit!

So what are the recommendations and interventions used in CBT for insomnia?

  1. Spend only seven or eight hours in bed, and don’t compensate for insomnia by lying in bed for ten or eleven hours, as that just teaches you to be an inefficient sleeper.
  2. Go to bed and get up at the same time every day.
  3. Don’t go to bed unless you actually feel sleepy. If you can’t fall asleep get out of bed and do something peaceful and relaxing until you are sleepy, and then go back to bed.
  4. Try to get regular exercise but don’t exercise in the evening.
  5. Use your bed only for sleeping (or sex), don’t read or watch TV or look at your smartphone in bed.
  6. Don’t nap.
  7. Reduce your intake of caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol, especially later in the day.

Now it’s time for my nap—no, my mid-day exercise!

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) Outperforms Drugs for Insomnia

The New York Times today had an excellent article The Evidence Points to a Better Way, which summarized what I have written about before. Cognitive behavioral therapy for chronic insomnia (CBT-I) kicks the butt of drug therapy!

One study compared CBT with a common sleeping pill called Restoril and found that the CBT treatment led to larger and longer lasting improvements in sleep. Another study found that CBT treatment outperformed the drug Ambien, and that CBT alone was even better than CBT plus Ambien combined.

Even more impressive are the results of a large meta-study which was published today. This meta-study, which combined data from 20 clinical trials and involved over 1000 patients with chronic insomnia showed that CBT I resulted in these patients falling asleep 19 minutes faster and having 26 minutes less wakefulness during each night on average. The actual study is protected by a pay wall, but the summary results are here.

One might question the clinical relevance of these outcomes. Does falling asleep 19 minutes faster really make that much of a difference? Does sleeping an extra 26 minutes a night make patients feel better the next day? As a good sleeper, I don’t really know the answer to these questions.

But I suspect that the biggest impact of CBT-I is in affecting the person’s perception of control over sleep. One of the horrible things about chronic insomnia is that patients feel out of control in terms of their sleep. They worry tremendously about the impact of loss of sleep on their ability to function the next day. It is this worry cycle that actually can create insomnia.

So I suspect that even though the effects were durable but modest, that the overall treatment made a large difference in how people felt. There is a big difference between taking 45 minutes to fall sleep and 20 minutes to fall sleep. And I suspect that sleeping an extra 26 minutes a night actually does make a difference. I know that I feel much better on eight hours of sleep as opposed to 7.5 hours of sleep.

When I work with patients on CBT-I one of the things I work on is helping the patient lower their anxiety about the impact of sleep restriction. As crazy as it sounds, one of the interventions I typically use is to have the patient stay up all night and go to work the next day. Although they are typically very tired, they discover that they can focus and function, maybe not at 100% but at an adequate level, maybe 75% or so. This lowers a lot of the anxiety about insomnia, since even a bad night of insomnia typically leads to quite a bit more sleep than staying up all night.

Other than the time and energy that a patient must invest in learning CBT-I skills, there are no side effects of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. All sleeping medications have significant side effects the most troubling of which involve impaired cognition and coordination during the night and the following day. This impaired coordination and cognition leads to increased falling in the elderly, and probably also leads to an increase in automobile and other accidents. Because drug companies don’t want studies done on this issue, there are relatively few studies, but one study in Norway found that there was a doubling of traffic accidents among patients who took a variety of sleeping pills. Another study that compared 10,000 sleeping pill users to 23,000 nonusers found that the sleeping pill users were five times more likely to die young than nonusers.

So what does this mean to the person suffering insomnia? It means that you should avoid taking sleeping medications, and get cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. This kind of therapy typically does not take very many sessions. I teach the basic skills of CBT-I in about 4 to 6 sessions, and typically the entire course of CBT-I takes less than 10 sessions. There are also options for CBT- I online and even apps that run on your phone. One such app that runs on both android and iPhone is called CBT-I Coach. This app was developed with your tax dollars as part of a large Veterans Administration insomnia treatment program, and is excellent.

It’s getting late, so rather than have to experiment with any of these treatments, I’m off to bed…

Want to Sleep Better? Get Brief CBT-I Therapy for Sleep Instead of Sleeping Pills

“To sleep–perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub”

The New York Times reported on a terrific study at the University of Pittsburgh, looking at ultra short treatment of insomnia in the elderly. According to the article roughly 1/4 of older adults suffer from insomnia. The researchers streamlined an approach called CBT-I, which stands for cognitive behavioral therapy of insomnia.

There were only two sessions of treatment, totaling about 90 minutes. There were also two brief follow-up phone calls, over the first month. They tested this brief treatment and 79 seniors with chronic insomnia.

So what were the results of this study? They couldn’t have been very powerful, right?

Wrong. Two thirds of the CBT-I group reported a clear improvement in sleep, compared with only 25% of the people in the control group. Even better, 55% were cured of their insomnia. And six months later the results were even better.

So what was this magic treatment and the magic rules for curing insomnia? There were only four rules.

  • Spend only seven or eight hours in bed.
  • Set your alarm and get up at the same time everyday.
  • Never go to bed until you actually feel sleepy.
  • If you are tossing and turning and can’t sleep, get out of bed and do something relaxing until you get sleepy again. Then go back to bed.

These are standard cognitive behavioral sleep hygiene rules. And they are very powerful. Although not mentioned in the study, a few other rules are also helpful.

  • Regular exercise performed no later than midday is also helpful.
  • Reducing caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol all are helpful.
  • Avoid all naps.
  • Only use your bedroom for sleep and sex. Don’t watch TV or read in bed.

So why isn’t this treatment widely available? Could it be because there isn’t a powerful drug lobby for sleeping pills pushing this very effective therapy?

What is really tragic is that most seniors end up being prescribed sleeping pills for insomnia. And this is in spite of very clear data from research that shows that modern sleeping pills such as Ambien, Lunesta, or Sonata, have very minimal effects. On average they reduced the average time to fall asleep by 12.8 minutes compared to placebo, and increased the total sleeping time by only 11.4 minutes.

Patients who took older sleeping medications like Halcion and Restoril fell asleep 10 minutes faster, and slept 32 minutes longer.

How can this be? Why is it that patients believe that sleeping pills are much more effective? The answer is very simple. All of these drugs produce a condition called anterograde amnesia. This means that you cannot form memories under the influence of these drugs. So you don’t remember tossing and turning.  If you can’t remember tossing and turning even though you may have, then you perceive your sleep has been better. The drugs also tend to reduce anxiety, so people worry less about having insomnia, and thus feel better.

The hazards of sleeping pills in older adults include cognitive impairment, poor balance, and an increased risk of falling. One study in the Journal of the American geriatrics Society found that even after being awake for two hours in the morning, elder adults who took Ambien the night before failed a simple balance test at the rate of 57% compared to 0% in the group who took placebo. This is pretty serious impairment. Interestingly enough, in the same study, even young adults who took Ambien showed impaired balance in the morning.

So what are the key messages here?

1. Even though sleeping pills give people a sense of perceived improvement in sleep, the actual improvement tends to be almost insignificant, especially with the newer and very expensive sleeping medications. The older medications increased sleep time a little better, but have more issues with addiction and tolerance. Side effects of these medications are potentially very worrisome, since they can cause cognitive impairment and increased falling which leads to injuries, especially in the elderly. Why risk these side effects for such small improvements in sleep quality?

2. Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia works better than sleeping pills, has no side effects, is cheaper in the long run, and has a lasting impact on sleep improvement.

3. Most people who suffer insomnia will see their physician, who will prescribe sleeping pills. This is partly because of the lack of availability of cognitive behavioral treatment for insomnia. There are relatively few cognitive behavioral practitioners, and even fewer who regularly do CBT-I. We need to improve the availability of these treatments, and should follow in the footsteps of the University of Pittsburgh researchers in learning how to streamline these treatments. Most people don’t have the patience to spend 6 to 8 weeks in cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. Instead we need treatments that can be administered in a single week or two with some brief follow-up.

4. CBT-I availability will always suffer from the fact that there is no powerful corporate interest backing it. There are no CBT-I sales reps going to doctors offices offering free samples of CBT-I for doctors to pass out to their patients. I don’t have a solution for this problem, but would be interested in hearing from my readers as to how we might more effectively promote effective and safe treatments such as CBT-I.

Okay, now that I’ve written this, it’s time to trundle off to bed. As Hamlet said, “To sleep — perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub!”

Copyright © 2010, 2011 Andrew Gottlieb, Ph.D. /The Psychology Lounge/TPL Productions