Sleep & Insomnia Psychologist in North Sydney & Pymble

More Than “Just Try to Relax”

If you’ve ever been told to “just relax” when you can’t sleep, you’ll know how unhelpful that advice is. Sleep difficulties are rarely solved by willpower; they’re often maintained by specific patterns of thought and behaviour that build up over time, usually without you realising it.

At Cadence Psychology, with clinics in North Sydney and Pymble, we treat sleep difficulties using CBT for Insomnia (CBT-I): the most well-evidenced, guideline-recommended treatment for chronic insomnia, and one that doesn’t rely on medication.

Sleep Difficulties in Adults

Sleep problems can take different forms, and often overlap with other difficulties we treat:

• Difficulty falling asleep, often tied to a racing mind or anxiety
• Waking during the night and struggling to fall back asleep
• Early waking, sometimes linked to depression or stress and burnout
• “Tired but wired”: physical exhaustion alongside a mind that won’t switch off
• Sleep anxiety: worrying about sleep itself, which paradoxically makes it harder
• Disrupted sleep-wake patterns from shift work, screen use, or irregular schedules

Sleep difficulties are rarely isolated; they often sit alongside anxiety, low mood, or ADHD, and we work with the full picture.

Sleep Difficulties in Children & Teens

Sleep issues in younger people often connect to broader emotional or developmental factors:

• Bedtime resistance or difficulty settling
• Anxiety at bedtime, including separation anxiety in younger children
• Racing thoughts in adolescents, particularly around school or social pressures
• Irregular sleep patterns, especially common in teenagers
• Sleep difficulties linked to ADHD, which are extremely common and often under-addressed

We work with parents to build sustainable routines alongside any individual therapeutic work with the child or teen.

How a Psychologist Can Help

CBT-I is a structured, time-limited approach, with most clients seeing meaningful improvement within a small number of sessions:

• Sleep education, understanding what’s actually maintaining the difficulty, not just the symptoms
• Restructuring unhelpful sleep-related thoughts, using techniques from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
• Stimulus control and sleep restriction techniques, which sound counterintuitive but are the most effective components of CBT-I
• Addressing the anxiety around sleep itself, often using ACT or Mindfulness-based approaches to reduce sleep-related worry
• Treating co-occurring conditions, since sleep difficulties frequently improve significantly once anxiety, depression, or ADHD are also addressed