Questions and answers

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia. It is the treatment clinical guidelines recommend first for long-term insomnia, ahead of sleeping pills. It works by changing what you do around sleep, mainly when you go to bed and when you get up, rather than by sedating you. Small Hours guides you through a six-week CBT-I program. What is CBT-I?

It is the program a therapist would take you through, delivered as an app. It is not a therapist, not medical care, and it does not diagnose anything.

Each morning you answer a short diary about last night: when you went to bed, how long it took to fall asleep, time awake in the night, when you got up. It takes about two minutes. The app works out your sleep efficiency from those answers, and once a week it recommends one change to your time in bed. A short lesson opens each week to explain why.

The share of your time in bed that you actually spent asleep. Time in bed runs from when you tried to go to sleep to when you got up; sleep time is the hours between falling asleep and finally waking, minus the time awake in between. Naps during the day do not enter sleep efficiency. Sleep efficiency is the number CBT-I is built around, and the app works it out for you from the diary. Try the free calculator

The stretch of the night you give to sleep: a set bedtime and a set getting-up time. Each week the app looks at your past week's sleep efficiency and recommends one change to that window, from a fixed, published table. Nothing is predicted and nothing is scored. You choose which end of the night the change goes on.

Often, yes. For the first couple of weeks most people feel more tired, not less, because they are spending less time in bed. That is the method working: the pressure to sleep builds. Week two is where most people are tempted to stop, and the app is built for that stretch, with a weekly trend instead of a nightly verdict and a coach for the hardest hours.

Nothing breaks. Fill in the mornings you can. The weekly recommendation needs at least 3 nights out of the last seven; with fewer, the app waits for more rather than guessing, and your window stays as it is.

No. The diary is all it needs.

Long-standing insomnia is what this program is for. Left untreated it tends to keep coming back rather than fade.

Yes, and keep taking it exactly as you do now. Nothing here asks you to change a medication. If coming off something is your goal, that is a plan you make with the doctor or pharmacist who prescribed it.

The program assumes a roughly regular night, and shift work breaks that assumption. There is a shift-worker section inside the app that you switch on in Settings, which adapts the advice. Small Hours is still the same program, and the shift-worker section does not promise that it will fit every roster.

Small Hours is for adults with long-term trouble sleeping. It is not medical care, it does not diagnose anything, and it will not tell you how your sleep is likely to turn out. If a health problem is affecting your sleep, or you are taking medication for sleep, work through whichever applies with your doctor. The app is built to sit alongside your doctor's care, not to replace that care. You must be 18 or older to create an account.

The sleep diary, your sleep-efficiency numbers, your weekly sleep-window recommendation, and the lessons for weeks 1 to 3. No time limit and no card needed. If you never subscribe, these keep working. What it costs, in full

$14.99 CAD a month, or $8.33 a month, billed as $99.99 CAD once a year, opens weeks 4 to 6, the AI coach, and a progress report you can give your doctor. The price is in Canadian dollars and is the same wherever you are. Changed your mind about a yearly payment? Ask within 14 days, at hello@trysmallhours.com, and you get all of it back. After 14 days there is no refund.

Yes. A new account gets the coach and the other extras for 22 days, with no card needed to start it. The lessons of weeks 4 to 6 come with the subscription. When the trial ends, the free parts stay free and the rest of the program and the coach are $14.99 CAD a month, or $8.33 a month, billed as $99.99 CAD once a year.

In Settings, press “Manage payment, invoices or cancel”. That opens your billing page at Stripe, and one click there cancels. You are not charged again. Your subscription keeps running until the end of the month you last paid for (on the yearly plan, the year), and then stops. After that: every lesson stays open, including weeks 4 to 6; the coach, the progress report and the pattern analysis close; and the diary, your numbers and your weekly sleep window stay free, as they always were. There is no refund for the unused part of a month or a year, except that a yearly payment is refunded in full if you ask within 14 days. On the monthly plan you can pause for 1, 2 or 3 months instead of cancelling, from the same Settings card.

Stripe, a payment company. Your card details go to them and never reach Small Hours. Billing is monthly or yearly, in Canadian dollars.

Not yet. Small Hours runs in the web browser on your phone or computer, so there is nothing to download. On a phone you can add it to your home screen in two taps, and it then opens like any other app, with its own icon. Your diary is the same wherever you sign in. How to add it to your phone

Yes, the same one. Open the website in Safari, tap the Share button, then “Add to Home Screen”. Small Hours then opens full screen from its own icon, and it can send you a morning reminder to fill in your diary (on iOS 16.4 or newer). Steps for Chrome and other browsers

With an email address and a password, or with a Google account. If you forget your password, the sign-in page can send you a reset link.

Yes, in any modern browser. The screens are laid out for a phone first, because that is where most people fill in a diary at seven in the morning, but everything works at a desk.

Only a few, about your own account: when your free trial is about to end, when your six-week debrief is ready, and anything to do with your subscription. Every one of them has a link to stop them. Sign-in and password emails still come when you ask for them. Your address is never sold or shared with advertisers.

Your account and diary stay as they are. If an account sits unused for a long time, you get an email asking whether you want it kept or deleted, and nothing is deleted without that notice.

It is health information and treated that way: never sold, never shared with advertisers. The privacy page lists exactly what is stored and how to ask for deletion, and you can read it before signing up.

You can. The people who run Small Hours can, when they need to in order to run or fix it. A clinician who uses Small Hours sees your data only once a link between your accounts exists; being sent their sign-up link does not create a link between your accounts. Nobody else, and never advertisers. The privacy page

Your diary, your sleep numbers, the lessons you have finished, and what you write to it. The coach is not given your last name. What you write to the coach is kept with your account like the diary, and is never sold or used for advertising. The coach's answers come from CBT-I science and this program's own material, and the coach is not allowed to invent clinical advice.

One thing. Once a day, what you have typed in your own words is checked for signs that you may be in crisis. If the check finds something, a person is told. The check is not immediate and is not a monitoring service. Everything else you write is read by nobody unless you ask us for help with it.

In a database run by Supabase, encrypted at rest, with rules that restrict every row to the account it belongs to. Some of the services Small Hours uses operate outside Canada, so your information may be stored or processed outside the country. British Columbia's privacy law applies, and Canada's federal law applies as well where information crosses a border.

Write to us. You can ask for a copy of what is held about you, have something wrong corrected, or have your account and its data deleted, and each gets an answer within 30 days. A crisis record created by the daily check is the one thing kept after deletion, for seven years from the day it was made.

Yes, and it is built for that. With a subscription you can make a progress report from your own diary, charts on a few pages, to email, print or bring to an appointment. The app never gives an opinion on medication; that conversation stays with your doctor.

Sign up through it. It tells the app whose program you joined and lets you pick the date your group started, so the week the app shows matches the week your group is on. You can change that date yourself in Settings at any time. The link does not by itself let the clinician see your diary; the privacy page explains when that happens.

Yes. Verified clinicians get the whole app free: lessons, coach, the lot. Use it to evaluate the program, to know what a patient sees, or for your own sleep. There is nothing to set up; patients sign up themselves. Small Hours for clinicians

Write to us at the address below and say what you were doing when it happened. There is also a feedback option inside the app, in Settings.

Small Hours is not an emergency service and nobody is watching it in real time. If you are in crisis, call or text 9-8-8 in Canada or the US at any hour, or 911 if you are in immediate danger. Crisis help