Insomnia is one of the most common reasons people see a doctor about sleep, and one of the most poorly served. The appointment is short, the complaint is vague by nature, and the fastest thing a busy clinician can do is write a prescription. That is how a problem with a well-evidenced behavioral approach ends up being managed with a tablet.
None of that is a failure of the person in the room with you. Behavioral sleep medicine is a small specialty — there are only a few hundred certified practitioners in the United States — so a primary care physician often has nowhere to refer you even when they know CBT-I is the right answer. What changes the outcome is walking in with the specific information that makes the decision easy, and asking for the thing by name.
The articles here cover what to bring, what to say, and how to read the answer you get. They also cover the part that matters more than any of it: the symptoms that mean the problem is not insomnia at all, and that a self-guided program of any kind is the wrong place to start.
