When we deal with sleep difficulties, it becomes important how we think about sleep. That is why part of your treatment should involve identifying your thoughts about sleep. It is good to replace these thoughts with positive thinking.

In Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), the idea is to reduce a person's misconceptions about sleep and teach more positive sleep behaviors, including good sleep hygiene.

Sometimes sleep problems start as some isolated incident but then become chronic. One technique for examining your thinking is to consider alternative beliefs to those you have adopted in the past. You can determine which beliefs are best supported by actual information available to you.

An example of an issue you might address would be the feeling that it is extremely important that you get a good night’s sleep. If you feel that a poor night's sleep will be a disaster, it is only going to generate more worry and anxiety, making sleeping that much more difficult. You can challenge this thinking and simply consider other considerations that will reduce the all-encompassing importance of sleeping. Think that "It's no big deal" or "I'll be a little tired and cranky tomorrow but that won’t be anything I can't handle.").

When you try to force yourself to sleep, you are only putting pressure on yourself and this just will make your sleep worse. Just focus on what you can control, like your schedule and sleep hygiene, and you will be able to fall asleep and stay asleep.

Doing this practice of challenging these old thoughts and replacing them with new thoughts may take some practice, but in so doing, you will get the old thoughts away from how they seem typically automatic and change your patterns.