Insomnia Coach Customer Service

Overall, I’ve benefited from using this app. What I learned was that I was going to bed too early, which is why I was waking in the night for sometimes 1-2 hours of just lying awake, so learning that was helpful, however, despite putting in information about sleeping well with fewer and shorter wake-ups, it kept pushing my bedtime until it was past 11 pm, cutting my sleep down to less than 7 hours, when I kept telling the app I’m feeling good at just under 8 hours or about 7h30m (this is down from attempting to get 9+ a night but waking up in the night). If I go to bed before the prescribed bedtime because I’m tired and I fall asleep quickly, the app chastises me for going to bed too early as it disrupts my sleep drive, but if I’ve fallen asleep in 5 minutes or less, that shows high sleep drive and sleep hygiene will ding you for the short time it takes to fall asleep, too, so I wish it would accept that if I went to bed 15 minutes early and also fell asleep quickly, maybe that’s what I needed. You can edit the bedtime it gives you, but it chastises you for editing that, too. When I’ve gone to bed 15 minutes early and fallen asleep quickly, I would think it would edit my bedtime to earlier, not later and later and later. Despite my frustrations with some of the advice, I have recommended it to friends and patients who are having trouble sleeping as I do think I learned some things.

I’ve really been enjoying this app and I’m not even using half the features it has. I have recommended it to friends. I love entering my sleep information into the sleep diary and seeing the trends over time as I work on my sleep hygiene. One feature I do NOT like is that the app locks all the sleep diary entries (no edits or additions) if you update your sleep time prescription even if you haven’t completed the entry for that day! It’s very frustrating because now I have unnecessary holes in my diary because I wanted to make the dialog box asking me to update those sleep times to go away. SUGGESTION: They should have a warning box instead that says if you edit any entries for your current sleep prescription it will undo it or that edited information won’t be included after a sleep prescription has been run for that week. Either way, let me edit my sleep diary please!

I suddenly began having issues staying asleep after Covid. Sometimes I would go 2-3 days without sleeping at all and rarely slept more than 6 hours per night. This went on for 5 months prior to finding this app. Lack of sleep made me feel miserable, and I began having anxiety and panic attacks. I consulted my doctor who prescribed Trazodone which didn’t help me sleep any better and made me feel even worse the next day. I tried to get an appointment with sleep clinics, counselors, therapists, etc and all told me they weren’t taking new patients. I was so desperate for help and sleep and feeling so terrible. I found this app and did not have high hopes that it could help me. I was amazed at how well it worked. After getting through the first week of logging my sleep schedule, the sleep coach made sleep and wake time recommendations. I was going to sleep, staying asleep, and feeling 100% better within 2 days. It was amazing, and I am so thankful for this VA program! I truly feel like it saved my life. Lack of sleep had taken me to a very dark place. Thank you to the developers of this app for providing a way for people with chronic insomnia to help themselves.

My doctor recommended this app to me. It has helped me be more disciplined about my sleep efficiency and improve my sleep drive. I learned that it’s okay to wake up a bunch in the night as long as you go back to sleep - which is great because I never sleep straight through the night. I wish there was a way in the sleep diary to indicate that I got out of bed in the middle of the night after being awake more than 15 minutes. All I can enter is how long I was awake and the app assumes I was in bed that whole time and chides me for it. Otherwise I like all the features of the app.

This app is helpful to a modest degree, but the emphasis is all on keeping bedtime and wake time consistent. If you’ve got that down and your problem is waking up in the night, then this app will not help you (other than to remind you ad nauseam to get up if you’ve been lying in bed awake more than 15 minutes). There are no tips here for how to avoid waking up and lying awake in the night. For me the advice that I should power through for days on end with inadequate sleep (no naps!) flies in the face of the science.

After 2+ years of insomnia, following the protocol in this app for 6 weeks has eliminated it. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it. This app changed how I understand sleep. Now I have an extra 4 hours of life every day and I don’t wake up miserable or try to “catch up” on lost hours during the day. Instead, I’m living my life more fully, which makes sleeping easier too. It’s a virtuous cycle. VA, thank you for making this app and helping me get my life back on track. I’m ever grateful.

I cannot say enough about the effectiveness of this app. I’ve been taking prescription sleeping pills for about 14 years and tried to get off them many times but could never sleep through the night. After following Insomnia Coach’s behavioral modification plan for 2 months I now sleep through the night with quality sleep. It does take discipline and you do have to make changes to your nightly routine. But for me, clean restful no-drug sleep is absolutely worth it. I highly recommend.

It is very useful for if your concerned about having Insomnia. I was concerned about if I had it so that was the main reason why I downloaded the app. I would recommend fixing the thing in the sleep diary because I think there is a bug. This app is very educational with lots of accurate information. If you are concerned about Insomnia or trying to go to sleep then this app is a great fit for you.

Sleep is THE most important thing, it should be everyone’s first priority. This app is free and it can help you find patterns / problems through logging your sleep- It only needs 7 days of data in order to provide helpful recommendations. Under the tools tab, you can also find various tips, and there are even guided meditation/relaxation activities. The app’s not perfect but it’s a good solid option.

I struggle with insomnia and felt pretty desperate and out of options when I downloaded this. I’m a physician so thought I was doing everything right about sleep hygiene and while I did a lot, this app still really helped. If you do your best to fill in your sleep diaries and follow the recommendations, you’ll likely be sleeping better. I definitely benefited from this app.

After over 20 years working with sleep problems, thanks to you, I have a tool that works. I tried it first before recommending this to my patients. I went from sleeping 3-4 hours of interrupted sleep to 7-8 solid hours. What a relief! I never wanted to try medication for myself due to the significant associated risks. This is the better choice. Thank you!

This is an app to help people with insomnia and even has exercises to use at night if we can’t sleep, yet there is no option to make the screen backgrounds black within the app. So we have this bright white background blaring light into our eyes which we know wakes up the brain. That is counterproductive. Please fix!

I stayed with the full program, which was 5 weeks of daily diary entries and slow, sometimes difficult, behavior changing. They were incremental steps toward understanding and practicing better sleep and awake techniques. I’m grateful for access to this free program and the wonders it created for me to have better, more sound sleep.

I find some of the guided meditation very helpful. Also, that it’s not subscription based like Calm or other app. My only issue is it doesn’t seem to support wireless headphones? Cannot get the meditations to play through ear buds. Please keep adding other guided meditation and offering more variety of time lengths.

This has been a life changing app for me. The first 2 weeks are not easy, but the long term payoffs are huge. I’ve been sleeping pill free for a year now and maybe 95% of the time sleeping through the night and waking up feeling refreshed.

Way too detailed for me to answer. Trying to comply, I fear, would only make my sleep worse by hyperfocusing on it. But I can see the value for others. Thanks for creating a helpful tool.

This app changed my life. After 15 years of chronic insomnia, I no longer wake up for hours in the middle of the night. The particular sleep rules were new to me and they work. I am forever grateful.

I was skeptical at first of staying up later to sleep better. Three weeks in and I am sleeping more efficiently. 4 stars because I cannot use some of the tools via bluetooth earbuds. Wired work or phone’s speaker

Trying to use this bright app when I’m supposed to minimize bright light is counter productive.

Easy to use, helpful explanations about why following the recommended actions can sharpen awareness and foster better choices for improving sleep habits.

Thank you, Dept of Veteran Affairs. Insomnia Coach is very helpful, and one of the best apps on my phone. With diligent use, the CBT-i exercises and procedures are very effective. I’m learning to sleep better without fear.

It won’t download i don’t know why

Created by medical professionals this free ap guides you through the CBTI process and graphs your results. It also has relaxation techniques and guided imagery to help you with thoughts and anxiety. Would love to have even more sleep stories and more resources to help with anxiety induced insomnia. App is excellent imo.

I used to get 6-7 hours a night, and after following this program for 8 weeks I’m having heart palpitations in the middle of the night making me wake up after only 4-5. My body is very tired and I fight myself for hours to not fall asleep until my instructed sleep time, but then I wake up after about 4 hours and struggle to get sleepy again. It is taking me about an hour and a half to come down from my heart palpitations (and now sometimes panic attacks), and then I try to go back to sleep with very little success. My sleep was poor before but now it’s worse, and I fear that I’m stuck now because I’m incredibly anxious about losing sleep and I think that’s why my heart palpitations are happening in the early morning. I did not have these before I started the program. It’s nice to see this app has worked for others, but it’s not working for me and now I feel like I’m stuck with this worsened sleep.

It’s interesting that the purveyors of CBTI (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia) give themselves outstanding grades as to their rates of success, but in this app, after one night reporting four and a half hours of sleep, their advice was to “see a professional.” So my sleep problem is great that you’re giving up on me? At first I thought all that mindfulness and record keeping was helpful, but it soon turned into making me MORE nervous about bedtime and the prospect of not sleeping. At one point the app suggested I go to bed at 1:30, as if by making myself so resoundingly exhausted, I’d immediately sleep. No, it just meant that my sleep would begin, maybe, at 2:00 or later. A big aspect of CBTI is to train your brain that your bed is only for sleeping (or sex, ha) so after 15 minutes of trying, you’re supposed to get up and do something else. Some nights I’d leave my warm bed and wander around the cool house two or three times, each time eating up about an hour of potential sleep time. I finally decided that if I was not going to sleep, I’d be better off staying in a comfortable place, at least resting, perhaps meditating. As a fellow sufferer, I don’t want to discourage anybody from seeking help with their insomnia. CBTI might work for you. It’s worth a try, and if you’re to do so, this app is probably as good as you’ll get. It’s designed by the Department of Veteran Affairs (or at least it has some veteran connection). It’s user-friendly. And, as I said, at first it helped. I just want to share that if it makes you feel you have to “perform” or else, you have my permission to relax, take half an Ambien (without feeling guilty), and go back to bed.

*Update* Still not taking my data for days that are the worst. Went to sleep at 5:40am this morning and woke up at 5:30pm. App won’t allow me past the error box stating I entered negative hours. I went to bed in the morning and woke up in the afternoon/evening. I don’t get the app’s confusion. Needs fixing. *Original post* When my doctor told me about this app and walked me through it I thought “wow, finally something that will work for actual insomniacs”. That thought was based on the claim that it can be used to log odd hours of sleep. Day two came though and I found a glitch. I didn’t get to bed until 5am that morning, and slept through the day till 5:30pm. Unfortunately the log won’t accept my hours at all because it claims I’ve entered negative hours for my sleep time. No, I’m just an insomniac who crashed for a day and slept more than 12hrs. Shouldn’t be that complicated for the app to figure out. Not sure what to do really except skip that day’s entry, but that means the data used to build my recommendations is going to be off. Not cool.

When I try to save my sleep data in the diary, it gives me an error message saying my sleep time would be a negative number and doesn’t accept it. Without the diary accepting y sleep data, I don’t think I can get any “coaching,” so while I find many of the tools possibly helpful, I don’t think the foundational interactive tools are working and there’s nothing in the app you can’t just read on a website or in a medical pamphlet.

I’ve just started using this and note a couple problems. The “Progress” tab doesnt accurately reflect the data I entered, it shows fewer “time asleep” hours that I entered in my diary. I got my first recommendation, which was to go to sleep at 1AM in order to wake up at 5:30, which would give me 4.5 hours of sleep, about 1.5 hours less than the average sleep I had recorded in my diary.

This app says use your be only for sleep and sex. That’s fine, but it doesn’t account fir sex in the diary, saying I need to go to sleep shortly after going to bed. It also set my sleep time at 1:30 am when I often wake at 5 but want to wake at 7. I’m looking for eight hours, not 3 ½. And there is no customer service.

This app chastises you when you wake up too early and can’t fall back asleep. “It’s important to wake up at the same time every day,” it says. Well, if I could do that, I wouldn’t need the app! Doesn’t give enough help for when you wake in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep, or when you wake up too early.

I’m on the 5th week of the program and I understand that it wants me to stay up late to get tired enough so I can sleep better. However, it doesn't let me sleep more than 6-6.5 hours and I’m very tired as a result. Is this part of the program? When will it allow me to sleep more? Thank you.

The insomnia coach gave me a bedtime of 2:00 am for a wake-up time of 7:30 am. Why would it do this? I religiously updated my sleep diary for a week, going to sleep between 10:30 and 11:30 pm and rising between 7:30 and 8:30 am, getting an average of 6.8 hours of sleep a night. I just took that out of my progress report. It makes no sense.

Like put in actual sensible writing. I literally have to write my issues in the comments. Because according to the app going to bed at 10pm not being able to sleep till like 4am conflicts in their app. Also I don’t care about the sleeping habits of bats. I care about actually getting quality sleep.

Please fix the compatibility with wireless headphones. It's frustrating not to be able to use it whenever/wherever I need it. The tools are beneficial to my fight with insomnia, BUT could be better with wireless compatibility.

Spent 6 weeks struggling to stay up until 11pm and then waking up at 4:30am. Expected to start weaning off only 5.5 hours of sleep and start going to bed earlier. Instead I got “Congratulations you have finished.” That’s it. Nothing more.

There’s no overall comprehensive overview of how this app works and what the exercises are for each week. As a survivor, I can’t start something opaque like that, I have to know what all the requirements will be before I can commit to putting myself through that.

I have a set of Bose headphones and the audio doesn’t play through them. All other apps I have the sound plays as it should through them. How to get this fixed?

This app looks great, but is assuming a lot of control over your schedule - it looks like it will be very hard to follow all the advice if you are taking care of younger children.

It would be a great help if the app would sync between devices (IPAD and IPhone. What apps these days don’t allow you to sign in and sync between devices.

I sleep at 3pm and wake up at 9pm but it says “error” when trying to input that information; this app doesn’t account for irregular sleep hours which is kind of counter productive and renders the app useless.

Me and my partner cannot use air pods to listen to app. It’s important not to disturb one another. And, there’s no way to contact someone to get it fixed - it is this app not the air pods that are problem!

Unhappy no contact with app support.

Fitbit beats this VA app to smitherins!

The bright white background and the inability to listen with the screen off is a no go.

Designer didn’t account for user having a partner. AirPods don’t work with this app so none of the audio tools can be used without disturbing partner!

This app is great for those who work regular days or even swing shifts but it won’t work for those working midnight shifts. Entering sleep times for those individuals results in an error code. This used to not happen but it has been a problem for a few months now.

In the sleep diary I recorded the time falling asleep as 11:10pm and awakening at 4:00am. It calculates that I was asleep for 1hr50mn and not 4hr50mn. The app seems to have some good advice but there is something wrong with the basic functionality.

I entered the time I fall asleep, which is around dawn each morning. I get up mid-afternoon around 3:00pm. A message appears that says I am getting out of bed before I go to sleep. What? Don’t most insomniacs fall asleep after midnight and therefore wake the same day? So disappointed because it looks like an app that could really help me. PLEASE HELP! Maggie M.