sleep dependency

Welcome back! The last few weeks we’ve been talking about the four most common causes of sleep problems and what you can do to fix them. This week we are going to focus on sleep dependencies, a common problem that most people don’t even know exists! Sleep dependencies are anything that someone needs to have with them/around them to fall asleep. Sleep dependencies can be things like a pacifier, a blanket, a stuffed animal, a parent, a cell phone, music, noise, silence, or even TV. There are some sleep dependencies that are healthy because they help you to fall asleep fast and stay asleep, but there are many sleep dependencies that are unhealthy- even though they might help you fall asleep initially, they make you wake up later in the night. What makes a sleep dependency healthy/unhealthy? Sleep dependencies aren’t a bad thing in and of themselves,  so in any sleep treatment, we want to make sure the person has one or two healthy sleep dependencies. But we also have to look out for unhealthy sleep dependencies and when we spot those, we have to figure out how to get rid of them as soon as we can. Healthy sleep dependencies have [...]