I wrote a first post last month about a workshop I went to given by Professor Colin Espie - "Sleep well and live better: overcoming insomnia using CBT".  I mentioned that he went through the sequence: What is insomnia?  Why is it a big deal?  Why is cognitive behaviour therapy relevant?  Is it clinically effective?  How can it be delivered in real world practice?  In today's post I would like to look more at Why is it a big deal?  And I would like particularly to focus on links between insomnia and depression. 

(This & last week's social anxiety blog posts are available as a PDF file or a Word doc - you may need to 'save' the latter before you can open it)

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point"     C. S. Lewis

(This blog post is available both as a PDF file and as a Word doc - you may need to 'save' the latter before you can open it) 

"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."  Jonathan Safran Foer

"No man was ever wise by chance."    Lucius Seneca  

(This & next week's social anxiety blog posts are available as a PDF file or a Word doc - you may need to 'save' the latter before you can open it)

"At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time."         Frederich Nietzsche

This is the first in a series of intended posts about using Mark Williams & Danny Penman's excellent recent book "Mindfulness: a practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world" as a self-help training in mindfulness practice.  My hope is that these blog posts will provide some back-up resources to the many good things already present in the book, accompanying CD & linked website. 

I read a lot of research. When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 16,900 abstracts.

So yesterday was a day seminar on Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) with Robert Elliott.  I wrote yesterday about my excitement over starting this sequence of monthly workshops - there are another five due over January to May next year.  Well how did the day go?

I woke gently bubbling with excitement.  I'm off in a couple of hours or so to Glasgow to join a course entitled "Emotion-focused psychotherapy: Level 2 workshop series".  Sadly I missed the first day of this seven seminar sequence - I was at the October Scottish Mixed Group peer residential.  Hopefully I'll get to all of the next six.  There's a seminar scheduled for today and then one a month from January through until May.  I believe there will be about 20 participants, presumably all pretty experienced psychotherapists/counsellors.  What fun!