It causes insomnia if it is not under your control, but whether it is under your control is under your control.

Confused yet?

It is quite simple, and many studies support it.

In September 2015, a group of researchers published an article in the British Journal of Health Psychology that demonstrated a connection between people’s ability to control their emotions and their ability to sleep.

They sent out a survey that collected information on the participants’ demographic details, insomnia symptoms, the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale, anxiety, and depression.

At first, from the 2,333 responses, they found no relationship between control over emotions and insomnia.

However, when they sent follow-up surveys six and 18 months later, the 1,887 and 1,795 respondents showed a clear, though small, tendency to sleep worse when their ability to regulate their emotions declined. The insomnia from which many of them suffered as a result of the decreased emotion regulation was persistent, not just an anomaly.

From this, we can conclude that a decrease in your ability to regulate your emotions can make you sleep a little worse, and that this effect is small but persistent.

This will not come as a surprise to many of you. We can probably all testify to sleeping worse when we dwell on our worries in the evening when we go to bed.

Psychologists have confirmed this often, such as in a 2009 paper in the journal Emotion, in which they demonstrated that people who dwelled on their daytime behavior when retiring to bed were kept awake by their accompanying feelings of regret, shame, and guilt.

The obvious question is how to overcome this lack of emotional control so that you can sleep well again. Luckily, science is quite helpful here.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is a psychological treatment that helps people to challenge and reframe their negative thinking patterns. The aim is to change your emotions by changing the way you think about yourself and the world.

Normally, it is used as a treatment against depression and anxiety disorders. However, if control over your negative emotions is the aim, then why not try it for insomnia too?

Researchers have done precisely that. Not only have they found that cognitive behavioral therapy is effective as a treatment for insomnia, but they have also discovered that you don’t even have to attend a clinic or self-help group. An online course in the comfort of your home is good enough.

In a review of studies on the effectiveness of computerized cognitive behavioral therapy published in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, a research team concluded that most randomized controlled trials on the subject found that it could improve sleep quality, sleep efficiency, the number of awakenings, the time between going to bed and falling asleep, and people’s score on the Insomnia Severity Index. It does not improve the number of hours you sleep, but the quality of the sleep you get.

There is a much simpler method to overcome sleeplessness and insomnia. This little technique is partly based on the cognitive behavioral therapy mentioned before but has been proven even more effective…