Sleep Better and Conquer Insomnia: the iPhone app that helps you go to sleep

197 sleep better.jpgGenerally phones disturb your sleep more than they help it… they ring or buzz or beep and wake you up. But a company have just invented a way your phone could actually help you get to sleep.

With an app of course.

The Sleep Better and Conquer Insomnia app doesn’t sing you lullabies but it does take you through a five-week sleep improvement course based on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. Devised by a certain Dr Gregg Jacobs, the site claims that the course on the app is more effective than taking sleeping pills.

We’re seeing a new rash of apps that aim to improve you psychologically: the company behind Sleep Better and Conquer Insomnia – Mental Workouts – is at the forefront of this therapist-in-an-app movement (ther-app-y??). Other offerings include Flying Without Fear – another CBT course on an app that helps people overcome fear of flying.

Since psychologists already use computers to treat people with psychological problems through Cognitive Behaviour Therapy programmes, it makes sense that positive psychology software would work on phones too.

In fact, having a resource like that constantly on and within hand’s reach could be even more useful than having it on a computer somewhere.

This is what company Mental Workouts has to say about how the CBT app will help you sleep:

“Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has consistently been proven the most effective first-line treatment for improving sleep. It improves sleep in 75-80% of insomnia patients and eliminates sleeping pill use in almost half of patients. And, in three major studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Archives of Internal Medicine that directly compared CBT to sleeping pills, CBT was more effective than sleeping pills. CBT also has no side effects and maintains improvements in sleep long-term.”

Convinced? At £11.99 it’s expensive for an app, but cheaper than a session with a psychologist.

See more on Mental Workout

Related: Jamie Oliver gets in on the celebrity app trend and 5 tasteless iPhone apps

Anna Leach

One thought on “Sleep Better and Conquer Insomnia: the iPhone app that helps you go to sleep”

  • CBT is a solid therapy for anxiety on the ground, but it works far too slowly to be effective for many fearful fliers. When I started the SOAR program in 1982, we used CBT. It did help some clients, but it could do nothing for people who had panic or whose anxiety developed rapidly. That is because, when anxiety develops rapidly, it overwhelms the cognitive abilities needed to make use of the CBT tools in the fearful flier’s toolkit.

    We I found, after ten years of study, research, and experience was that people who have rapidly rising anxiety and panic need automatic control of feelings, so that the anxiety and panic simply does not even get started.

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