Quiet Your Mind And Get To Sleep – by Dr. Colleen Carney & Dr. Rachel Manber

One of the biggest problems with disrupted sleep is how it relates to other conditions, especially chronic pain or mental health difficulties—each part of it makes the other part(s) worse.

How, then, to interrupt that cycle, and enjoy better sleep that allows one to improve the other things too? Of course, you can tackle all parts of it in any order, but this book deals with it from a “sleep first” angle, with the philosophy that you’ll then be well-rested and better able to take on the other things.

The authors use an approach based in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), which you’ve probably encountered elsewhere, but the difference here is that the authors don’t assume that all your problems can be just flowcharted away (which is otherwise a common weakness of CBT; attempts to note that the thing isn’t as bad as you automatically assumed will fail, if the thing really is that bad).

Instead, we see tools for improving sleep from the inside out, examining in detail how sleep works and what can go wrong with it, before then troubleshooting sleep-incompatible behaviors, optimizing our sleep system, and, as the title promises, quieting our mind. The authors give us tools for change to implement in all parts of this, including tools for changing our way of thinking about sleep, when often the stress of sleeplessness can, by painful irony, contribute to our sleeplessness.

It’s not all about head-stuff though; the authors do also cover peripheral matters including discussing quite an assortment of substances and medications that can help, harm, or both).

Lastly, the authors talk us through creating a plan, including working out in advance the possible challenges we may face (due to factors unforeseen by the authors, but known to us) and how we’ll overcome them or, if necessary, work around them.

The style is to-the-point self-help pop-science, without undue jargon, and/but with copious citations throughout, and an extensive bibliography, itself preceded by a generous set of resource-containing appendices.

Bottom line: if you struggle with sleep and that problem is comorbid with something else (e.g. chronic pain, stress, anxiety, depression, PTSD, etc—actually the authors cover far more conditions than we’ve had room to mention here) then this is an excellent book to tackle your sleep holistically with those things in mind.

Click here to check out Quiet Your Mind And Get To Sleep, and rest well!