How does CBT work for sleep disorders?

CBT for sleep can help in a couple of different ways. So we can either work on what's called sleep hygiene which is looking at a person's bedtime routine. So, for example, not using a phone too close to bedtime, looking at the behaviours a person carries out before they go to bed and seeing whether they're helpful. We can work on a person's thoughts whether it's anxiety or worry that might be keeping a person up at night and we can use different techniques to help a person with that. Or we might look at sleep restrictions, so it may be that they're not worrying and they have got good sleep hygiene but still, they struggle with sleep. And so what we do is try to work with a person's natural circadian rhythms and perhaps put in some sleep restriction to stop a person sleeping until at the point that they feel really, really tired and then wake them up before they're ready to wake so that their body feels that they really need sleep. And then if you do that for a prolonged period of time you can eventually elongate the amount of sleep that person gets.