Breaking the stress–sleep cycle: how CBT-I and ACT can help you sleep again
It’s 3am. You’ve been awake for an hour, watching the minutes tick past and doing the quiet arithmetic of how little sleep you’ll get before the morning’s first meeting. The more you need to sleep, the further away it drifts. If that sounds familiar, you’re in good company – and there is a well-researched way out.
Many of the people I work with in The Hague are juggling demanding international roles: long hours, meetings that span time zones, and the quiet strain of building a life in a new country. Stress and broken sleep tend to arrive together – and, left alone, they feed each other.
The stress–sleep loop
A stressful day makes it harder to switch off at night. A poor night then makes the next day feel harder to cope with, which winds the stress up further. Over time, the bed itself can start to feel like a place your mind associates with frustration and wakefulness rather than rest.
The encouraging news is that this loop can be interrupted – and you don’t have to do it with willpower or sleeping pills. Two evidence-based talking therapies are especially good at it: CBT-I and ACT. I often use them together.
CBT-I: gently retraining your sleep
CBT-I – Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia – is widely regarded as the first-line, gold-standard treatment for long-term sleep problems, recommended ahead of sleeping medication. Rather than masking symptoms, it works on the habits and thoughts that keep insomnia going. A few core ideas do most of the work:
- Matching time in bed to your actual sleep. Lying in bed for hours “trying” to sleep usually backfires. Temporarily narrowing your sleep window helps sleep become deeper and more solid – and we widen it again as things improve.
- Helping your brain link bed with sleep again. Small, consistent boundaries rebuild that association. If you work from home, that often means keeping the bedroom for rest, not for laptops and late emails.
- Easing the anxious thoughts about sleep. Thoughts like “I’ll be useless tomorrow if I don’t sleep now” pile on pressure that keeps you awake. We work on replacing them, gently, with calmer and more realistic ones.
Where ACT comes in
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) takes a complementary angle. Instead of arguing with anxious thoughts, ACT helps you change your relationship to them – making room for difficult feelings without letting them run the show, while you keep taking small steps toward what genuinely matters to you.
For a lot of people, it’s anxiety – about work, about deadlines, about sleep itself – that keeps the mind racing after lights-out. ACT is particularly good at loosening that grip, which is exactly why I often weave it together with CBT-I.
Built around a busy life
You don’t need to overhaul your calendar to begin. Sessions can be arranged around international meeting times, and anything we practise between sessions is designed to fit alongside your work, not compete with it. We always go at your pace – and you’re welcome to try just a few sessions to see how they feel before deciding to go further.
The evidence behind this
I only use methods I can stand behind. If you’d like to read the research for yourself, I’ve gathered the key peer-reviewed studies on CBT-I and related approaches – each with a link to the original paper – on my Evidence page.
Ready to sleep better?
If the stress–sleep cycle feels familiar, you don’t have to untangle it on your own. You can read more about how I work in individual sessions, or get in touch to ask a question or arrange a first conversation. There’s no pressure – just a calm, practical place to start.
This article is for general information and isn’t a substitute for individual medical or psychological advice. If sleep problems are affecting your health or daily life, it’s always worth speaking with your GP as well.