Effects and mechanisms of a mindfulness-based intervention on insomnia

Abstract

Medication alone is not sufficient to treat insomnia. In addition, the side effects of sleep medications themselves cannot be ignored during treatment. Insomnia begins with poor sleep quality and discomfort, but as it continues, patients fall into a vicious circle of insomnia with negative thoughts and dysfunctional and distorted perceptions related to sleep. Mindfulness-based intervention for insomnia corrects these sequential cognitive and behavioral processes. The mindfulness technique basically recognizes all the thoughts, feelings, and experiences that occur to us as they are, nonjudgmentally, and then trains them to return to the senses of our body. In this way, while noticing all the processes of the sequential vicious cycle and training them to return to our bodies (e.g., breathing), mindfulness determines whether we are really sleepy or just fatigued. This mindfulness-based intervention can be a useful nonpharmaceutical intervention for insomnia, and its stability and efficacy has been proven by many studies.