Reclaiming Rest: How CBT-I Helps You Rebuild Trust With Your Body

Do you ever find yourself impacted by sleepless nights?

Maybe it looks like tossing and turning for hours when you are craving rest. Or perhaps you fall asleep easily, only to wake up at 2am with racing ruminating thoughts about your past, or future. Does your mind get caught in the “sleep anxiety” loop counting down the hours that you should be sleeping. 

If you have been here, I want you to know that you are not alone. There was a period in life where my mind stayed wide awake and alert, even when my body was begging for rest. I knew what CBT-I was, but it wasn’t until I began applying the steps myself that I truly understood how healing it could be. This experience has deepened my empathy for those who come to therapy exhausted and frustrated by their sleep cycle. 

What has struck me the most about cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is how it doesn’t force sleep. Instead through the application of cognitive and behavioural interventions it helps to re-build self-trust with your body. This addresses and re-wires the patterns that keep you in fight-or-flight at night. This is when you feel wired but tired when your body is alert but your mind is craving stillness. CBT-I is practical, compassionate, and evidence-based. It is also considered the gold-standard treatment for insomnia. From my perspective as a relational therapist, what makes CBT-I transformative is how it invites you to build a new relationship with rest. 

WHAT EXACTLY IS CBT-I?

At its core, CBT-I helps you to understand your personal patterns that keep your body restless and your mind alert. We do this by identifying and addressing the thoughts, beliefs and behaviours that impact your sleep. The cognitive and behavioural components in CBT-I work in the following ways:

Cognitive- We welcome curiosity as we explore and re-frame your current worries, thoughts, and beliefs that are reinforcing anxiety around sleep. Instead of trying to push away and avoid anxious thoughts about sleep, we learn to meet them with understanding so that you can reframe them.

Behavioural- We retrain your body’s sleep cues through structure and routine. This can look like developing consistent wake-up times, and wind down rituals. We also explore behaviours during the day that impact your sleep later at night. Over time, your body begins to recognize when it’s time to rest.

Mindfulness and relaxation- practices are also used throughout CBT-I treatment. The integration of these techniques helps to regulate and settle the nervous system during the day, and also helps ease into a state of rest more easily at night. 

AN INTEGRATIVE APPROACH TO CBT-I

In my practice, I use CBT-I (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia) as a foundation for evidence-based sleep improvement. But I also integrate somatic awareness and nervous system regulation to address the tension, anxiety, and worries that your body holds alongside your thoughts. Sleep challenges can also live in the body such as tension in your jaw, muscle stiffness, tightness in your chest. These cues can mirror the mind’s uneasiness. By tuning into both mind and body, we can create a sense of calm and support restorative sleep.

Sleep is deeply tied to how safe and supported we feel. That’s why I take a relational approach in therapy creating a space where you feel seen, understood, and supported as you navigate your unique sleep challenges. Together, we explore not only habits and thought patterns, but also how your nervous system responds to stress. Interweaving these strategies together can help regulate your nervous system, teaching your body that sleep is not something to achieve, but instead something that you allow. 

WHAT CBT-I LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE

I want to acknowledge that everyone’s healing journey looks different, and so do your individual sleep challenges. Once we understand the patterns that are reinforcing your sleeplessness, we can start reworking them through structured and compassionate steps. 

CBT- I is typically completed over 5 or 6 sessions, that are spread out weekly or bi-weekly. It is collaborative, structured, and highly individualized. Between sessions, you’ll receive personalized practices to explore such as gentle steps that invite you to integrate what you are learning. These tasks aren’t about perfection; they’re about helping you build consistency, and trust in your ability to support your own rest through small sustainable changes. Here is a glimpse into what our CBT-I work together might look like: 

Sleep awareness & Intake Interview: Gaining insight into your sleep challenges, routines, patterns, and stressors in your life. During this session we explore how other factories such as stress, environment and emotions intersect with your sleep patterns. 

Sleep Diary: Tracking sleep-wake cycles to identify your personal habits or triggers that interfere with rest. This often reveals small yet powerful insights into your current sleep routines and challenges. Stimulus control: Re-training your brain and body to associate your bed with rest and not wakefulness or stress. This helps the mind begin to associate your bed with calm and sleep rather than wakefulness. 

Sleep Restriction: Paradoxically, we work to reduce and adjust your time in bed to strengthen your body’s natural sleep drive 

Cognitive Reframing: Challenging beliefs like “If I don’t get eight hours of sleep, I will feel terrible tomorrow, or tomorrow will be ruined”. Mindfulness and Relaxation: We work on building tools to calm the stress response, to help your body remember what safety feels like before sleep. Every step builds upon the last, helping you to slowly release the urge to control sleep and instead, learn how to trust your body’s wisdom again. 

When helping Others keeps you Alert and Awake at night: For many helping professionals the same qualities that make you attuned and responsive during the day can make it hard to power down at night. Your cortisol and adrenaline levels are required to be on high alert so that you can attune and respond to others. Anxiety levels are often amplified in professions with high levels of stress, responsibility, and emotional labour. Over time this dysregulates the nervous system, often leading to the following cycle:

Stress → Hyperarousal → Poor sleep → Heightened stress response/challenges with emotional regulation → repeat 

With CBT-I we interrupt this cycle, not by suppressing your alertness but by teaching your nervous system how to shift gears again so that you can be alert and present during the day, and shift into rest and sleep at night. 

RECLAIMING YOUR REST AFTER BURNOUT OR COMPASSION FATIGUE

Burnout can feel like an exhaustion and constant fatigue in your body and mind that is hard to shake. When burnout and insomnia coexist, the body is often caught between craving rest and fearing what rest represents: slowing down, confronting emotions, or losing control. 

CBT-I helps bridge the gap between wanting rest and feeling safe enough to allow it. By pairing structure with compassion, and somatic awareness it gently trains the nervous system to recognize rest as nourishment. This work becomes a tangible practice in self-trust. Each small change such as consistent wake-up time, closing your laptop, or taking a slow breath signals safety to your body. This safety loop is reinforced when it is repeated over time. 

With CBT-I, this cycle begins to shift. As your sleep improves, your nervous system becomes more balanced and your body relearns how to move between alertness and rest. Over time the pattern starts to look more like this: Stress → Awareness and grounding → Restful sleep → emotional regulation → Capacity to cope → Repeat 

BEYOND SLEEP: REST AS AN ACT OF SELF-COMPASSION

What I love about CBT-I is that it goes far beyond just “fixing” sleep. So often rest can be treated as a task, something to earn or perfect. Rest isn’t a reward, and when we heal the relationship with sleep, we also notice balance returning to other parts of life such as mood, focus, ability to handle stress and respond to your needs. When we shift the perspective on rest, and start viewing it through the lens of self-compassion, everything changes. You notice the parts of you that feel afraid or uncomfortable to let go, the parts that equate stillness with danger, or the ones that hold the belief that productivity equals worth. For example, we might explore the part that fears letting go, or the part that believes rest is unproductive and meet them with curiosity and understanding instead of control. Over time, this integration of the behavioural and cognitive interventions used throughout CBT-I  allows your body to remember what safety feels like, even in stillness. From a nervous-system perspective this allows your parasympathetic (rest and digest) system to activate more naturally.

Reflection: If this post has resonated with you so far and sleep has felt out of reach for you, I invite you to pause, tune-in and ask yourself: - What is my relationship with rest right now? - What thoughts, or body sensations arise when I think about slowing down? 

- How do I currently feel about my sleep habits? My goal with walking you through CBT-I is to help you not only improve your sleep, but also your self-trust. I hope to empower you to change your approach to rest, and to no longer view it as a problem to fix but a relationship to nurture. 

So if you are struggling with sleep, restless nights and over-thinking CBT-I can help support you in remembering that your body knows how to sleep. It just might be seeking safety, space, and some re-learning of new habits to remember. 

Even after completing CBT-I, it’s normal for sleep challenges to reappear from time to time. The difference is that you will have tools, strategies, and insights to guide yourself back to rest with confidence and care. Through this process, you’re not just improving your sleep but you’re reacquainting with your body’s natural rhythms and learning how to respond to sleepless nights without judgment or fear. Reclaiming your rest becomes an ongoing practice of self-care and self-love, one that supports not only your sleep but your capacity to navigate life’s stresses with greater ease and resilience. 

Stephanie