Review the patient's estimation scale as well as the activity diary. Follow the previous session home assignment.
- How much do you know about sleep? Do you want me to tell you a little about how it works?
Examine briefly how much the patient is aware of sleep and try to fill the gaps. Take advantage of the patient material. Also, be careful to normalize and validate the patient's problems with not being able to sleep.
Normal sleep is between 6-9 hours a day, with individual variations. The most common is 7 hours.
Examine how the patient usually sleep and try to estimate an approximate vocal time and sleep time and calculate the patient's sleep efficiency. Here it is good to engage the patient because this later will be a task the patient will perform by means of the sleep diary.
- About when do you go to bed?
- How long does it usually take to fall asleep?
- When do you wake up? Do you also get up then?
- Are you awake at night? How long? What do you usually do then?
Based on this picture, you can calculate the patient's "bedtime", "sleep time" and "sleep efficiency". This can give a reference if the patient is sleeping too much and has some compensatory behaviors that may help maintain sleep problems.
- Help me count, how long do you spend in bed and how long do you sleep about a normal night?
Here it may also be appropriate to ask what the patient thinks about the most common myths about sleep.