Insomnia and placebos

One of the major factors that influence insomnia is emotion and expectation. If you think you should be able to sleep, you are going to struggle. If you have little expectation of sleep, you actually find it easier.

Storms and Nisbett demonstrated this in a study where they gave two groups a placebo. The first group were told they had been given caffeine pills while the second group were told they had been given relaxation pills. The first group found it easy to get to sleep while the second group found it harder.

This came up in a group discussion recently where someone suggested a great tactic for being the effect: try to stay awake. She found that if she stopped trying to sleep and started trying to stay awake, she fell asleep pretty quickly. With the results of the above study, perhaps we should not be suprised.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 26th, 2019 at 11:00 am and is filed under Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.