A novel neurofeedback protocol to improve sleep, health, and learning

One in three people regularly experience insomnia, and this can undermine health and performance. Unfortunately, the best existing sleep interventions leave a large unmet need. For instance, cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) only provides a meaningful therapeutic response 75% of the time and only 40% of insomnia sufferers achieve complete remission with it.

CBT-I also does not help with some important daytime consequences of poor sleep such as inattention or elevated blood pressure. This may be because CBT-I doesn't specifically address the cortical overarousal driving insomnia.

Neurofeedback may be able to help here by letting people visualise how fast their brain is working and train themselves to produce brain rhythms more conducive to restful sleep. While there is already some evidence supporting neurofeedback as a sleep aid, most protocols focus on training 'sensorimotor rhythms' which might not be the ideal ones to target.

The project proposed here focuses instead on the brain rhythms most associated with hindering sleep onset, or with making deep sleep stages lighter and less stable. It is hoped that by training people out of habits to produce these unhelpful brain rhythms, and training up habits to produce sleep facilitating rhythms instead, our new neurofeedback approach will not only promote objectively better sleep, but could have knock on benefits to physical and mental health, and to improved attention and learning.