Lisa Steinmetz, Laura Simon, Bernd Feige, Dieter Riemann, Umair Akram, Megan R. Crawford, Anna F. Johann, Kai Spiegelhalder

Adherence to sleep restriction therapy – An evaluation of existing measures

  • Behavioral Neuroscience
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • General Medicine
Save to CiteDrive Show PDF

SummarySleep restriction, a key element of cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, involves considerable behavioural changes in patients' lives, leading to side‐effects like increased daytime sleepiness. Studies on sleep restriction rarely report adherence, and when assessed it is often limited to the average number of therapy sessions attended. This study aims to systematically evaluate different measures of adherence to cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia and their relationship with treatment outcome. This is a secondary analysis of data from a randomized controlled trial investigating cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (Johann et al. (2020) Journal of Sleep Research, 29, e13102). The sample included 23 patients diagnosed with insomnia according to DSM‐5 criteria who underwent 8 weeks of cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia. The following adherence measures based on sleep diary data were used: number of sessions completed; deviations from agreed time in bed; average percentage of patients deviating from bedtime by 15, 30 or 60 min; variability of bedtime and wake‐up time; change in time in bed from pre‐ to post‐assessment. Treatment outcome was assessed using the Insomnia Severity Index. Multiple regression models were employed, and insomnia severity was controlled for. Results showed that none of the adherence measures predict insomnia severity. Baseline insomnia severity, dysfunctional thoughts and attitudes about sleep, depression or perfectionism did not predict adherence. The limited variance in the outcome parameter due to most patients benefiting from treatment and the small sample size may explain these findings. Additionally, using objective measures like actigraphy could provide a better understanding of adherence behaviour. Lastly, the presence of perfectionism in patients with insomnia may have mitigated adherence problems in this study.

Need a simple solution for managing your BibTeX entries? Explore CiteDrive!

  • Web-based, modern reference management
  • Collaborate and share with fellow researchers
  • Integration with Overleaf
  • Comprehensive BibTeX/BibLaTeX support
  • Save articles and websites directly from your browser
  • Search for new articles from a database of tens of millions of references
Try out CiteDrive

More from our Archive