First, two exclusions. If you snore heavily, wake gasping, or are sleepy enough during the day for it to affect driving, see your GP about sleep apnoea and expect a sleep study. And if the problem is insomnia itself, the best-evidenced treatment is CBTi, cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, available in Australia including online and often in six sessions. It works better than anything else on this page and it is worth doing first.
What a whole-picture appointment adds is the honest audit. Most people know the advice and cannot apply it, so the useful conversation is not about sleep hygiene in general but about your specific evening: what time you eat, how much alcohol there really is, when the last coffee was — half of people underestimate this by hours — when work email stops, what the bedroom temperature is, and whether you are in bed for nine hours trying to get seven, which reliably makes things worse.
Then the things that sit underneath. Pain that you have stopped mentioning because it is always there. Hot flushes in perimenopause, which are a sleep problem more than anything else. A bladder that wakes you. Anxiety that only shows up when the lights go off. Each of those has a different answer, and treating them as one problem called insomnia is why nothing worked.
We pick two changes that survive a bad week, and review in a month. Hands-on work and acupuncture are used here for the physical side — held tension, a body that will not switch off. The clinic is in Lane Cove, five minutes from the village.
