Psychology2016

150 CHAPTER 4

THINKING CRITICALLY

Do you think that sleepwalking is an adequate defense for someone who has harmed or killed

another person? Should a person who has done harm while sleepwalking be forced by the courts to

take preventive actions, such as installing special locks on bedroom doors? How might this affect the

person’s safety, such as in a fire?

The response entered here will be saved to your notes and may be

collected by your instructor if he/she requires it.

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INSOMNIA Most people think that insomnia is the inability to sleep. Although that is

the literal meaning of the term, in reality insomnia is the inability to get to sleep, stay

asleep, or get a good quality of sleep (Kryger et al., 1999; Mayo Clinic Staff, 2014). There

are many causes of insomnia, both psychological and physiological. Some of the psy-

chological causes are worrying, trying too hard to sleep, or having anxiety. Some of the

physiological causes are too much caffeine, indigestion, or aches and pain.

There are several steps people can take to help them sleep. Obvious ones are con-

suming no caffeinated drinks or foods that cause indigestion before bedtime, taking medi-

cation for pain, and dealing with anxieties in the daytime rather than facing them at night.

That last bit of advice is easy to say but not always easy to do. Here are some other helpful

hints (Kupfer & Reynolds, 1997; Mayo Clinic Staff, 2014; National Sleep Foundation, 2009):

1. Go to bed only when you are sleepy. If you lie in bed for 20 minutes and are still
   awake, get up and do something like reading or other light activity (avoid watching TV
   or being in front of a computer screen) until you feel sleepy, and then go back to bed.


2. Don’t do anything in your bed but sleep. Your bed should be a cue for sleeping,
   not for studying or watching television. Using the bed as a cue for sleeping is a
   kind of learning called classical conditioning, or the pairing of cues and automatic
   responses. to Learning Objective 5.2. Studies have shown that the light
   emitted by television screens and particularly e-readers can be very disruptive to
   the natural sleep cycle (Chang et al., 2015).


3. Don’t try too hard to get to sleep, and especially do not look at the clock and
   calculate how much sleep you aren’t getting. That just increases the tension and
   makes it harder to sleep.


4. Keep to a regular schedule. Go to bed at the same time and get up at the same
   time, even on days that you don’t have to go to work or class.


5. Don’t take sleeping pills or drink alcohol or other types of drugs that slow down
   the nervous system (see the category Depressants later in this chapter). These
   drugs force you into deep sleep and do not allow you to get any REM sleep or
   lighter stages of sleep. When you try to sleep without these drugs the next night,
   you will experience REM rebound, which will cause you to feel tired and sleepy the
   next day. REM rebound is one way to experience the form of insomnia in which a
   person sleeps but sleeps poorly.


6. Exercise. Exercise is not only good for your health, it’s good for your quality of
   sleep, too. Exercise is particularly useful for combatting hypersomnia, or excessive
   sleepiness in the daytime—one cause of insomnia (Rethorst et al., 2015).
   If none of these things seems to be working, there are sleep clinics and sleep experts
   who can help people with insomnia. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has an
   excellent Web site at http://www.aasmnet.org that provides links to locate sleep clinics in any
   area. One treatment that seems to have more success than any kind of sleep medication is
   the use of cognitive-behavior therapy, a type of therapy in which both rational thinking
   and controlled behavior are stressed (Bastien et al., 2004; Ellis & Barclay, 2014; Irwin et al.,
   2006; Morin et al., 2006). to Learning Objective 15.5.

insomnia
the inability to get to sleep, stay
asleep, or get a good quality of sleep.