READY TO LEARN ABOUT TREATMENT
If you are more of a mind to learn about treatment instead of starting therapy now, then at minimum you probably accept you have a sleep problem. That’s a good starting place, but you may also be confused about what it means to suffer from sleep problems or what it takes to fix them? Perhaps you’re resigned to live with bad and broken sleep because the prospect of treatment feels overwhelming. You may imagine the cure is worse than the disease. If you have sleep apnea, maybe surgery looks attractive, but you wonder about risks and benefits, not to mention costs. If you suffer from insomnia, drugs may have worked in the past, but you sense that medications are not the long term solution.
How ever you currently look at your sleep issues, your readiness to learn about treatment will serve you well. We recommend that you follow one or both of the next two steps:
In Step One, you briefly analyze your sleep symptoms to clarify how much impact problematic sleep is having on your daily life, and you attempt to pinpoint the problem, so you are clearer on what you need to treat.
Step Two offers a series of small or conservative treatment steps – “Little Big Steps,” if you will – which often provide rapid and clearcut improvements.
Easy and quick successes almost always motivate you to move forward with more advanced treatments. These small steps are extremely useful ways to learn about treatment, because they carry almost no risk, generate immediate benefits, and by going through this process you learn about treatment not by reading about it, but by “tasting it.”