What is Behavioral Sleep Medicine?

Welcome to our blog at Behavioral Sleep Medicine Associates! We will touch upon lots of subjects in this part of our website but our first post will be some basic info about Behavioral Sleep Medicine (BSM). The picture below is from the website of the Society for Behavioral Sleep Medicine, a great place to find even more information.

To start, let's place BSM in the greater context of Sleep Medicine. Sleep Medicine as a field has traditionally been based in Pulmonology (a medical specialty that studies the lungs). This is because for many years Sleep Medicine was focused mostly on Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) and the way breathing machines could help that disease.

In the past several decades however, there has been much more research on the many other conditions that fall within Sleep Medicine, such as insomnia, sleep phase disorders, parasomnias and many more! We'll discuss these in detail in other blog posts but for now, suffice it to say that Sleep Medicine continues to be a growing and rapidly evolving field.

Behavioral Sleep Medicine developed from the need for therapies to treat the sleep conditions that cannot be easily solved with a breathing apparatus. The most well known treatment under the BSM umbrella is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBTI). More info can be found on this topic on our website.