Sleep Easy

Book excerpt: Say goodbye to lousy sleep with this six-week, step-by-step programme to help you kick insomnia to the curb forever. Bad sleep sucks. Sleep deficiency defies our biology and sabotages our days. Yet more than a third of us struggle to get to sleep or stay asleep at night. We can shake off the odd sleepless night, but when sleep difficulties persist, things start to unravel. Sleep debt takes its toll on our mood, energy, and productivity. It affects our behaviour around food and exercise as well as eroding our immunity, even our mental and physical health. As our best efforts to help ourselves fail, or perpetuate the problem, we can feel disillusioned, disempowered and frustratingly stuck. You're not alone, and there is a way through. This six-week, step-by-step guide will help you sleep easy. Bernice Tuffery, fed up after years of compromised sleep, made it her mission to learn how to sleep well again. She'd tried early nights, warm baths, a bit of yoga and meditation, but nothing worked. Even natural supplements, over-the-counter sleep aids, melatonin, and at times sleeping pills, failed to deliver a sustainable solution. As a qualitative market researcher, she was determined to know how to sleep naturally again. She discovered a proven, natural, and very learnable way to improve chronic sleep difficulties. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for insomnia (CBTi) is recognised internationally by sleep experts as the gold-standard treatment for insomnia. But with a lack of awareness, a severe shortage of experts offering it and virtually no public funding for treatment in New Zealand and Australia, it's hard and expensive to access. From her discussions with sleep professionals, extensive research and her lived-experience of restoring her own sleep, Bernice shares her knowledge with humour and heart. Confident that CBTi can be self-taught, she offers this practical and inspiring insiders' guide to getting a good night's sleep.