Sleep Europe 2026 | Design and results of a CBT-I-based group workshop intervention for adolescent sleep in schools

The whole project that we’re doing is focused on helping adolescents have better sleep, basically, because we know they sleep very badly. Most of them sleep very badly. 70% of adolescents have sleep complaints. And what we designed is a sleep intervention in the form of group workshops. So the idea is that we go directly to schools to perform these workshops on a weekly basis. So we do this during four weeks. So the project now has ended. We have like around 150 adolescents that have gone through the project through the study. The workshops themselves are inspired from cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which include a whole set of things to put in place to improve your sleep hygiene, improve your sleep habits during nighttime, reorganize your time. So yeah, it’s mostly psychoeducation, what is called sleep restriction. So sleep restriction is basically helping adolescents and people that go through CBT-I spend less time in their bed while doing nothing and basically try to listen to the sleep signals of your body and really try to limit the time in which you are in bed so that it matches really your usual sleep time. There is also stimulus control. Stimulus control basically focuses on really associating the bed with only sleeping and nothing else because adolescents, especially adolescents, tend to spend a lot of time in their bed doing other things like, of course, scrolling on their phone, but also calling friends, doing homework, even eating. So stimulus control really is important for adolescents in the fact of really reassociating the bed with sleep so that it really becomes like a sleep-inducing stimulus. And so, yeah, all these things that we put in place in the workshop, of course, we adapted this to the adolescent population and to the group format because usually CBT-I is performed on an individual setting with one psychologist and one client. Here we adapted this to the ecological setting and adolescent and group format and so yeah, the thing is that they go through the whole sleep intervention that lasts four weeks and then they have a one-week break through which we can see the follow-up results and the how they do one week, one month after the intervention.

Regarding the results, the main results that we have in terms of cognition, first, one of the tasks that we gave them is the sustained attention to response task. It’s basically a go, no-go task. And here, adolescents have to press on go trials. It’s on a tablet. They have to press on go trials as quick as possible and inhibit their motor response to no-go trials. And what we observe is that they are less impulsive after the sleep intervention, after one month of sleep intervention, they tend to press less on no-go trials and have more inhibition. In terms of emotional regulation, we had a virtual reality task that was stress-inducing. And what we wanted to see is if they were able to regulate their physiological stress. We recorded their heart rate and skin conductance while they were performing the stress-inducing VR task. It was basically doing calculations in front of a virtual classroom, and they had performance-based feedback. What we found was, unfortunately, that when inducing acute stress, it is intervention-resistant. So when you are exposed to an acute stressor, sleeping better or maybe having like better sleep habits isn’t enough. But what we found is that subjectively they tend to feel better during the task while doing the test. So it might go in the direction of slightly better emotional regulation, but we have also other results in terms of mental health and sleep itself, which are very encouraging.

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