Struggling to get a good night's sleep? There's an alternative to meds, experts say

For more than 30 years, Faye Dickieson battled the exhausting effects of insomnia. She turned to sleeping pills in an attempt to get a peaceful night's rest, but found no relief — only its lingering side effects. 

"I would just toss and turn, toss and turn," Dickieson, who lives in Alberton, P.E.I., told The Current's host Matt Galloway, noting she'd typically get just two hours of sleep 

"I wouldn't go back to sleep. It would just put me in a fog, and then I'd get to work, and I thought, 'Oh God, I don't even remember driving here.'" 

One in six Canadians suffers from insomnia, according to a phone survey of 4,037 Canadian adults published last year in the journal Sleep Medicine. 

The researchers found there's an "increasing use of various medications and substances to cope with this health issue." In particular, survey results suggested that use of medications, alcohol and cannabis for sleep is now 1.5 to two times higher than it was 16 years ago.

But the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction warns that sedatives for insomnia, like benzodiazepines, are addictive and can cause harmful side effects, including amnesia, liver damage and tolerance toward the drug — leading people to increase their dose to achieve the desired effects. 

Dickieson found an alternative treatment for her insomnia at a sleep seminar led by David Gardner, a psychiatry professor at Dalhousie University, where she was introduced to cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I). 

It's a non-pharmaceutical approach that can help with insomnia, but it can also be expensive and hard to access. Now, some doctors are trying to change that.

Dickieson says, for her, the results of CBT-I were transformative. "I was getting four and five hours [of] sleep with no pills," she said. 

"I feel full of energy, and so much more happier, and not in a fog anymore." 

CBT-I is a drug-free treatment that helps patients recognize and change old thoughts, behaviours and emotions that perpetuate insomnia into new approaches that bring on sleep naturally, says Gardner. 

This is done by having patients keep sleep diaries to track sleep habits and patterns, and learn a variety of sleep-enhancing techniques. Those include relaxation exercises, good sleep hygiene practices like setting a regular bedtime and wake time, and strategies for managing anxious thoughts.

"So you layer on all of these different techniques, and … we see a four- to eight-week program resolving 20 or 30 years of sleep problems and they don't come back," said Gardner. 

A certified psychologist helps guide this, and it can be done either one-on-one or in a group setting.