Mindfulness for Insomnia: A Four-Week Guided Program to Relax Your Body, Calm Your Mind, and Get the Sleep You Need

Break the cycle of anxious thinking and rumination that keeps you up at night. With this much-needed guide, you'll learn to quiet your mind, relax your body, feel less tense, and finally get the sleep you need.

Sleep plays a crucial role in our waking lives. While we sleep, our bodies are recharging with energy, damaged tissue is repaired, and our memories are stored. When we don't get enough sleep, we are tired, less positive, less motivated, less focused, and more likely to feel depressed. We may even experience more intense cravings for high-fat, sugar-rich foods. And yet, despite the myriad advantages of getting a good night's sleep, countless people suffer from chronic insomnia. If you're one of them, this book can help.

In this guide, a trained mindfulness expert teams up with a behavioral sleep specialist to offer evidence-based meditations and an innovative four-week protocol to address the emotional stresses and anxieties that lie at the root of sleep issues. You'll learn practices grounded in mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), mindful self-compassion (MSC), and guided mindfulness and acceptance for insomnia (GMATI) to alleviate the mental, emotional, and physical suffering caused by insomnia. You'll also learn to identify both internal and external factors that may be compromising your sleep, and develop a plan to address these issues.

There is nothing we can do to "make" ourselves fall asleep. In many ways, this is why insomnia can be so maddening. But what we can do is help create the conditions necessary for healthy slumber. The mindfulness tools in this book will help you do exactly that.

Catherine Polan Orzech, MA, LMFT, has taught mindfulness since 2000. She received her initial training in mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) at the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, and her professional training under the direction of Jon Kabat-Zinn, and is certified to teach MBSR and mindful self-compassion (MSC). She has taught and lectured on the subject of mindfulness internationally, and was founder and codirector of the Montreal Center for Mindfulness. Catherine has been on the faculty at numerous mindfulness institutes, including Thomas Jefferson University Hospital’s Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine in Philadelphia, PA.; the University of California, San Francisco’s Osher Center for Integrative Medicine; and the University of California San Diego’s Mindfulness-Based Professional Training Institute.

Catherine is currently an instructor in the departments of psychiatry and OB-GYN at Oregon Health & Science University, where she’s involved in research on mindfulness and women’s health. Her program on mindful and compassionate parenting is currently the subject of research at the University of Oregon. Catherine currently lives in Corvallis, OR, where she is a marriage and family therapist in private practice specializing in mindfulness-based psychotherapy focusing on individuals, couples, and families. Find out more about Catherine at www.corvallismindfulnesstherapy.org.

William H. Moorcroft, PhD, is a registered psychotherapist; behavioral sleep medicine specialist; emeritus professor at Luther College, Decorah, IA; and founder and chief consultant at Northern Colorado Sleep Consultants, LLC, where he now specializes in treating insomnia, children’s sleep problems, nightmares, and sleep problems in shift workers. He is also former director of a Sleep and Dreams Laboratory. Following earning a PhD from Princeton University, Moorcroft committed over forty-five years of his life studying and researching sleep and dreams. During this time, he did additional sleep disorder training at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and Rush Medical College in Chicago, IL. He has previously authored four books, many research papers, and numerous other publications. More recently, he brought his dedication and experience into the world to help people with their sleep problems.

Moorcroft knows how to find what is wrong with your efforts to sleep, and how to turn them around in a matter of weeks. Moorcroft was a psychology professor at Luther College in Decorah, IA, from 1971 through 2002. During this time, he focused his attention on sleep and dreams by doing research, writing books and articles, and teaching about this area. Since retiring from teaching in 2002, Moorcroft founded Northern Colorado Sleep Consultants, LLC, in Fort Collins, CO, and is currently its chief consultant. He also offers workshops and presentations on all aspects of sleep, dreams, and sleep disorders. Moorcroft is author of four widely used books on sleep and dreaming. The most recent, Understanding Sleep and Dreaming, is available from Springer Publishers. Find out more at www.sleeplessincolorado.com.

Foreword writer Jason C. Ong, PhD, is associate professor in the department of neurology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. He is past president of the Society of Behavioral Sleep Medicine, and author of Mindfulness-Based Therapy for Insomnia.