Grace Tworek is a clinical psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic who’s passionate about helping people who have autoimmune disorders. She describes ways therapists can help with strengthening a foundation for mental health: sleep.

Therapists can assist in improving nighttime sleep quality and quantity in many different ways. So one of the ways that behavioral sleep medicine providers will begin is by monitoring what’s currently happening with your sleep habits.

So by getting an understanding of current sleep habits and experiences, we can then tailor recommendations. This might look like a sleep log or tracking what’s happening on a nightly basis for a few weeks or so.

Some of the most common interventions utilized can include preparing one’s bedroom for sleep. So we’re trying to make sure we have a cool bedroom that has no noise coming in and is nice and dark so we can sustain sleep overnight.

Then we want to limit activities that we’re doing in our bed that are not sleeping. So for example, if you tend to scroll social media, play games, or watch television in bed, your brain begins to actually associate these things with bed. What we want to really reinforce is that your bed is a place to sleep.

So if we can limit activities outside of sleep or intimacy in bed, we can actually strengthen the association your brain has with your bed being a place to sleep. And over time, this will actually improve your sleep quality and your sleep quantity.

But if you’re experiencing significant sleep difficulties, keeping your medical team updated is a great place to start, and they can provide referrals to behavioral sleep medicine and sleep medicine providers.