Behavioral therapy: how to fix sleep, lose weight, and beat procrastination & burnout
John Halstead blogged on how he cured his insomnia with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). The method might generalize to other areas of life, like work, social relationships, diet, etc.
He writes:
'[...] The difficult bit: you now have to stay out of your bedroom and your bed until 5 and a half hours before your waking up time […] If you do not sleep for 40 minutes, get out of bed and do something boring in a different room, like meditation or tidying. [...] you are only allowed to sleep or have sex – you are not allowed to read or watch TV or listen to music. [...]
Sleep efficiency = (Total sleep time / Time in bed).
The goal is to reduce time in bed in the short term, such that sleep efficiency increases. After a few weeks, total sleep time also increases.'
The key seems to be in the behavioral part of CBT: insomniacs are negatively conditioned to being in bed.
Tossing and turning and forcing yourselves to sleep, gets you into a vicious circle of anxiety and negative affect. You shouldn't force yourself to do something that is hard to intentionally do. The trick to improve your sleep seems to be to slowly recondition yourself to like your bed and sleeping. The evidence base for this sort of behavioral therapy is apparently very good [more].
For insomnia, this is called I-CBT- which stands for insomnia cognitive behavioral therapy, which is odd as it emphasizes the behavioral part (recondition yourself to like your bed), rather than reframing cognitive distortions like 'Black and white thinking' (an example here would be 'I always must get a perfect 8 hours of sleep in order to function'). Why?
The narrative about the cognitive revolution in psychology in the 70s is that the cognitive movement replaced behaviorism a la Skinner as the dominant paradigm in psychology. Humans are more complex than rats in a Skinner box and shouldn't be modeled as a 'black box'. Maybe clinical psychology went overboard and overemphasized the cognitive part of CBT. The basics of operant conditioning are very well validated and perhaps neglected and useful for improving well-being. There are many other applications of Operant conditioning.
The general lesson that can be applied to other areas of life is very simple: maximize positive affect while you do a certain thing and minimize negative affect.
Don't 'overdo' things and keep general efficiency high. Keep things short and sweet.
Burnout
For instance, behavioral therapy might also work for work productivity issues like procrastination or burnout:
Like the insomniac overstayed in bed, you stayed at your desk for too long trying to get work done… but after 8 hours you start procrastinating, checking social media, the insomniacs tossing and turning equivalent. This creates a negative affect towards work. You now negatively conditioned yourself to work. The next day you come in and the work task is aversive (perhaps because you sacrificed IRL social life last night opting for social saccharine like FB). You check social media earlier as this provided temporary relief last time you had a negative affect at your desk.
The following is just a hypothesis and not psychological advice, so talk to your mental health practitioner before adapting this. But it seems that people who feel burnout, often take a few weeks or months off, then continue to work very hard. But perhaps a better way would be to radically reduce work hours (like insomnia CBT restricts time in bed). If you burnout, perhaps you need to increase your work efficiency:
Work efficiency = (Total work time / Time in office).
Which could be perceived as unusual and people might object that they can't go down to working only 5.5h/d, like insomniacs often struggle most with the 5.5 hours in bed limitation. But perhaps someone who burned out and after a week of holiday started to only very gradually ramp up their time at the desk and left the desk every time they checked social media and wasn't on task and restricted their time in the office, could slowly increase their work efficiency.
This might also explain why the pomodoro technique works- and suggests that if 25 mins is too much then one could try to go down to 5 mins.
The section Work All the Time You Work in Eat That Frog says that you don't want to be spending your intended-work-time not-working such that you have to spend your intended-leisure-time working.
'The productivity technique I'm currently finding most genuinely useful – aiming for lower volumes of daily output, but more consistently, rather than working in binges – has felt uncomfortable, because refraining from cramming as much in as I possibly can makes me feel anxious.' Oliver Burkman
Writing
For writing too 'Stopping is as crucial as starting. You've presumably read a hundred pieces on the importance of a writing schedule, or aiming for a minimum number of words per day. But the big lesson I took from Robert Boice's psychology study How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency is that what really matters is stopping once you've met your word goal or completed your scheduled writing session. (And Boice suggests these should start very short indeed, like 10 or 15 minutes.) Don't keep going, even if you're on a roll. Make yourself get up, walk away, and do something else.
This will feel all wrong: shouldn't you seize the momentum and get more done? No, Boice insists. The urge to push onwards 'includes a big component of impatience about not being finished, about not being productive enough, about never again finding such an ideal time' for work. If you keep going, you'll reinforce your worst impulses, whereas walking away helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to your writing project, day after day. And short work periods will ensure that writing remains something only modestly central to your life, which will prevent it becoming too intimidatingly scary to confront.'[1]
This might also generalize further to other areas of life:
Exercise efficiency = (Total time working out / Time at the gym)
I went from spending quite a lot of time at the gym but going infrequently to doing very short sessions more regularly and stopping whenever I started to feel meh. This has helped me to work out more regularly (the Body by Science book that teaches you how to shorten your workout). There's an interesting podcast on someone who does extreme moderation in most areas of life and has a cult following and lots of success with this.
His S-diet might be based on a similar principle, where he doesn't have sweets or seconds that don't start with S (Saturdays and Sundays).
He keeps his positive affect high while dieting:
Diet efficiency = (Being happy with your diet in the moment / Total time dieting)
'Cheat days', the 'Every other day diet' (which is very restrictive, but only every other day), and 'the best diet is the one you stick to' operate under a similar principle.
Social relationships
Perhaps this might even work for social relationships, where you keep your social engagements 'short and sweet' and not overstay your welcome. This doesn't mean that you can't hang out a lot or for many longer hours, but we all know perhaps that when things get a bit negative or boring, it might be good to spend some time apart. Also, french exist might be underrated.
In romantic relationships too, sex therapists sometimes prescribe abstinence to couples, which leads to couples to have less, but then better sex when they predictably break their abstinence.