Hello Sleep

A practical and compassionate guide to having a better relationship with sleep and overcoming insomnia from an experienced expert in behavioural sleep medicine. For many people who have trouble sleeping, each night is an anxious odyssey where getting a good night’s sleep feels like a battle to win rather than a basic biologic process. Hello Sleep is a guide for people with insomnia to help them shift their relationship with sleep, so that it stops being a battle and starts being enjoyable and natural again. A practical, self-guided tour through evidence-based interventions for chronic insomnia, Hello Sleep includes cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), phototherapy, chronotherapy, mindfulness-based approaches, and medication tapering. Jade Wu, a behavioural sleep medicine specialist and researcher, provides in-depth but down-to-earth scientific explanations of how sleep and insomnia work; anecdotes about real patients’ experiences with overcoming insomnia; rationale for why the evidence-based interventions help; and tips for how to problem-solve common pitfalls, along with tailored recommendations for special circumstances (e.g., pregnancy/postpartum, menopause, chronic pain, depression, older adults etc.). Hello Sleep is not a rigid set of rules or a one-size-fits-all approach. Wu believes this can make things worse for those with insomnia issues, making what was once easy and intuitive into something effortful and elusive. Instead, Hello Sleep treats insomniacs with respect, by giving them knowledge and empowering them to trust themselves and their own sleep.