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Nights that will not settle
Four different problems with one name, a bed that learned the wrong lesson, and a night prayer that was never meant to come out of a short night.
Not all bad sleep is a habit. One thing here is urgent. If you have fallen asleep, or nearly fallen asleep, at the wheel, that goes to a doctor this week, and do not drive drowsy in the meantime. Then the rest. If you snore or somebody has seen you stop breathing in the night, if you are sleepy all day despite enough time in bed, if your legs will not settle in the evening, or if your sleep changed when a medication changed, that goes to a doctor rather than to a course, because sleep with a medical cause does not respond to better habits. If you work nights or shifts, the fixed morning in lesson four is not written for you. And nothing here advises starting, changing or stopping any medicine, because some sleeping medicines are dangerous to stop suddenly.
What this course teaches
Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia
Two moves carry most of the effect. Stimulus control rebuilds the link between your bed and sleeping, by getting up when you are awake. Sleep restriction shortens your time in bed to match the sleep you are actually getting, so that sleep gets denser before it gets longer.
Why this one
This is the first line treatment in national guidance, ahead of medication, and the pooled trials are good. Guidance also recommends against sleep hygiene used on its own, which is why this course does not hand you a list of tips and call it a treatment.
What this course will not do
Sleep restriction is staged carefully here and is not for everyone. Apnoea, restless legs and medication questions go to a doctor. If you have not slept at all and do not feel tired, that is urgent and it is not insomnia.
Six short lessons on nights that will not settle. It separates short sleep from broken sleep from late sleep from unrefreshing sleep, because they have different causes and different answers. It explains why the bed itself stopped meaning sleep, and why trying harder is the one thing that reliably makes it worse. It takes apart the belief that failing to wake for tahajjud is a spiritual failure, using the Qur'an's own reduction of the night vigil and the night schedule the tradition calls the most beloved. One change is taught in lesson four, and it happens in the morning rather than at night.
Who this is for
Anyone lying awake doing arithmetic about how many hours are left. Anyone who has been told that if they cannot wake for the night prayer their heart must be diseased. Anyone whose sleep fell apart during one hard month and never came back. It assumes no clinical background and no training in the sacred sciences.
What this is not
This is education about sleep and it is not a treatment for insomnia. Sleep restriction, which is the strongest single component of the proper treatment, is deliberately not here, because it works by cutting your time in bed on purpose and a clinician has to screen you before anyone starts it. Nothing here asks you to lie in bed and face a frightening thought deliberately. There is no advice about starting, changing or stopping any medication, which is between you and your doctor, and some sleeping medicines are dangerous to stop suddenly. It gives no fatwa and no diagnosis. If you have fallen asleep, or nearly fallen asleep, at the wheel, that goes to a doctor this week rather than to a course, and do not drive drowsy.
The lessons
6- Where you left off. What is actually wrong with your nightsShort, broken, late and unrefreshing are four different problems, and most people have never separated them.7 min
- Why the bed stopped workingSleep is one of the few things that cannot be achieved by trying, and trying is what you have been doing.6 min
- Tahajjud is not owed from a night you do not haveThe Qur'an lightened the night vigil by name, and the tradition calls a sleep you could not fight a charity.7 min
- Anchor the morning, do not chase the nightOne change, seven days a week, and it is the safest useful lever there is.6 min
- What feeds itThe phone, the coffee, the lie in, the nap, and the clock you keep looking at.6 min
- When it is not just habitsSnoring, legs, body clocks and medicines, and why no list of sleep tips touches any of them.6 min
What this course is built on
- Qur'an 17:79, 25:47, 30:23, 73:1 to 4, 73:20, 78:9. Translation throughout: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004. 73:20 is the anchor text for this course. On 17:79, the course notes that nafila means additional and refers the weight of that reading to the scholar reviewer rather than pressing it.
- Harvey AG (2002). A cognitive model of insomnia. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 40(8), 869 to 893. Spielman's three factor model and Borbely's two process model are described in the lessons without being cited to a specific paper.
- Sahih al-Bukhari 212, 1131, 1145, 1153; Sunan an-Nasa'i 1784. Only reports graded sound or good are used, and each one inside a lesson links to its full entry with its grading. Sahih al-Bukhari 1142, the report about the three knots, is deliberately not used in this course, because it is routinely applied to people with insomnia, a late body clock or low mood as though it described their condition, and it does not. Sahih al-Bukhari 1152 is held back pending the scholar reviewer's framing. Two further reports this topic needs, on sleeping through fajr while travelling and on sleeping before isha, are not cited anywhere because their collection, number and grading were not confirmed.
- Trauer JM, Qian MY, Doyle JS, Rajaratnam SMW, Cunnington D (2015). Cognitive behavioral therapy for chronic insomnia: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Annals of Internal Medicine, 163(3), 191 to 204. Cited for the direction of its findings only. No pooled figure is published here because none was read off the paper.
- Al-Ghazali, Ihya Ulum al-Din, Book 10, on the arrangement of litanies and the divisions of the night vigil. Book number and title confirmed against the ghazali.org listing. Cited for lesson 3 and lesson 4, where the division of the night is treated as something fitted to a person's capacity and circumstances rather than as one standard. Ibn Sina in the Qanun and Ibn al-Qayyim in Zad al-Ma'ad both treat sleep among the determinants of health, and neither chapter reference was confirmed, so neither is cited inside a lesson.
- van Straten A, van der Zweerde T, Kleiboer A, Cuijpers P, Morin CM, Lancee J (2018). Cognitive and behavioral therapies in the treatment of insomnia: a meta-analysis. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 38, 3 to 16. Cited for the direction of its findings only. No effect size is published here because none was read off the paper.
- Chang AM, Aeschbach D, Duffy JF, Czeisler CA (2015). Evening use of light-emitting eReaders negatively affects sleep, circadian timing, and next-morning alertness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(4), 1232 to 1237. Presented in the lesson with its limits attached: a small laboratory study, high brightness over several hours, and a design that cannot separate the light from the content.
- Edinger JD, Arnedt JT, Bertisch SM, Carney CE, and others (2021). Behavioral and psychological treatments for chronic insomnia disorder in adults: an American Academy of Sleep Medicine clinical practice guideline. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 17(2), 255 to 262. The recommendation against sleep hygiene as a single component therapy is the constraint this course is built around.
- Scott AJ, Webb TL, Martyn-St James M, Rowse G, Weich S (2021). Improving sleep quality leads to better mental health: a meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 60, 101556. Cited for the direction of its finding only. No effect size is published here because none was read off the paper.