You’ve tried it all – cutting back on caffeine, sticking to a bedtime routine, even counting sheep – and still, sleep feels like an elusive dream. There you are, staring up at the ceiling, willing sleep to finally come and asking yourself: why can’t I sleep?!
You are not alone, and this happens to everyone at some point in life (and some of us more often). Insomnia and other sleep difficulties are incredibly common, and the harder you try to sleep, the more it seems to slip through your fingers.
In this post, I want to explore why traditional approaches to sleep often fail and introduce a new way of thinking about rest. I’ll share some practical strategies that are evidence based (using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) to help you change how you view sleep itself.
Covering the Basics: What is Sleep Hygiene?
Before we go into a more flexible approach to deal with elusive sleep, let’s cover the basics. After all, we want to make sure that some obvious areas have not been missed.
You should consider seeing your doctor if you have any ongoing health issues that may affect your sleep and investigate the impact they may be having. Being overweight for example, can impact your sleep. So this is the first area to check off.
At the same time, consider any significant life events going on. Are you grieving the loss of someone you care about or dealing with burnout in a stressful job or home life? These will influence your sleep, and in all cases are expected to affect your sleep for some time potentially. This is normal and to be expected and it would be unrealistic to say that sleep will be unaffected.
If it’s none of the above, then we can also consider your sleep hygiene.
Sleep hygiene is a set of behaviors that promote better sleep. It’s all the stuff that sets you up to sleep as well as possible. For some people, small changes to these habits can actually make a big difference!
Here’s a checklist of essential sleep hygiene tips:
- Limit caffeine and nicotine: Avoid them for at least four hours before bed.
- Avoid alcohol close to bedtime: Alcohol can initially make you drowsy but disrupts your deep sleep later.
- Maintain a regular sleep schedule: Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day.
- Create a sleep-friendly environment: Keep your bedroom dark, quiet, and cool (around 18°C). Consider blackout curtains and a comfortable mattress and pillow.
- Wind down before bed: Develop a pre-sleep routine, like reading, listening to soft music, or taking a warm bath. The key here is avoid overly stimulating activities before going to sleep.
While these tips are a great starting point, if you’ve already tried these and still find yourself awake at 2 am or unable to stay asleep, it’s time for a different approach. After all, if trying hard was all it took for you to fall asleep you’d probably be a master of falling and staying asleep, right? So trying harder on the strategies you’ve already attempted might not be the way forward.
Many people find themselves trying to tweak all parts of their life to get good sleep. So it’s time for something different, a new way that doesn’t involve micromanaging things like sleep hygiene obsessively.
Because here’s the thing: Traditional sleep hygiene often fails for one simple reason: it turns sleep into something you must achieve, rather than something that just happens, which creates anxiety and makes sleep even harder!
Let’s go into that a little deeper…
The Sleep Control Paradox
If you’ve ever told yourself, I have to sleep or I won’t function tomorrow, you’ve experienced the sleep control paradox. The more pressure you put on yourself to sleep, the more anxious and awake you become. This is because sleep isn’t something we can control directly – like digestion, or having a random hiccup, it happens naturally when the conditions are right.
So sleep is one of life’s great ironies – the more you chase it, the more it runs away! Think of sleep like trying to hold a bar of soap in the shower. The tighter you squeeze it to retain control over it, the more it slips out of your hand. But if you hold it gently and loosely, and just let it be in your hand, it stays and you can hold it easily!
Sleep works the same way. It’s not something you can do on command; it’s something that happens naturally. When you lie in bed telling yourself, I must sleep now!, your body switches into high alert.
Instead of calming down, you become more anxious! Oh no, I have XYZ tomorrow and I NEED SLEEP! Now you can’t stop thinking about that… leading to more anxiety… and guess what?! You have now plugged yourself into a vicious feedback loop!
So here is the alternative: Stop trying to sleep and focus on rest instead!
This mindset shift can take you out of the vicious feedback loop of anxiety and wakefulness. But we need to elaborate a little more on how the new approach actually works…
A Place for Rest, Not Sleep
Imagine this: What if, instead of trying to sleep, you treated your bed as a place to rest and restore – whether you’re sleeping or not?
The goal here is to reduce the pressure to sleep and create a restful environment. If sleep happens, great. If it doesn’t, you’re still getting the benefits of rest.
This is often a hard thing to grasp – it’s counter intuitive. Listen to what your mind might be saying right now about the idea. Is it chiming in and debating it? Maybe it says it’s stupid or won’t work? This is normal. Our minds work like this and those automatic thoughts often don’t serve us that well.
So instead of debating and wrestling with our mind or trying to control sleep, we can try something different instead!
What to Do If You Can’t Sleep
So we’ve established that shifting our mindset to aim for rest instead of trying to sleep. So when you’re awake in bed, you can try one of these approaches:
- Unhooking From Sleep-Related Thoughts
The first step is to practice unhooking from thoughts that create anxiety/frustration around sleep. This is where ACT-based techniques like Noticing and Naming come in. There are more advanced exercises and skillsets I work through with my clients where sleep is a major issue for them, but notice and name is one to get you started.
Notice & Name:
Adopt a sense of curiosity and just observe what your mind says and what you feel in your body, labeling it and saying silently to yourself in the format of: I’m noticing the thought/feeling/sensation of xyz.
So for example: I’m noticing the feeling of anxiety. Or, I’m noticing the thought of ‘why can’t I sleep’.
There’s no need to fight, judge or push the thought/feeling away. Just notice it, name it (e.g., Ah, I’m noticing here’s the “I won’t sleep” thought again), and let it be.
Why It Works: This exercise helps you observe your thoughts without getting entangled in them. Instead of trying to eliminate unhelpful thoughts, you create space for them to come and go naturally, reducing their impact. By adopting a position of noticing, you teach yourself that thoughts are just mental experiences and getting tangled in them or struggling is not something that has to happen, we can unhook from them and do other things!
- Restful and Soothing Activities
If unhooking feels challenging (we practice with clients in session to build the skill), shift your focus to some other restful activities such as:
- Mindful breathing or body scans
- Listening to gentle music
- Tuning in to the sensations of your bed: the softness of the pillow, the warmth of the blanket, the support of the mattress
The key here is to engage in these activities without the expectation that they will make you sleep. They’re simply opportunities to rest. It’s like you adopt the attitude of ‘Ok I’m not sleeping, let’s see what pleasant restful activities I can do while staying in bed’.
This is really important. Because the moment you aim for sleep and not rest, you are adopting the same strategy and falling back into the feedback loop that led to the sleep control paradox in the first place!
The restful strategies above are just a sample of how I work with clients on sleeping issues. Sometimes, there’s more at play that is affecting your sleep.
How You Spend Your Days Affects Your Nights
Sleep doesn’t exist in a vacuum – it’s deeply influenced by how you live your life during the day. If your day is filled with rushing, avoiding difficult thoughts and emotions, or constantly striving for perfection, your night is likely to reflect that tension.
It’s like insomnia is the revenge of all the stuff you ignored during the day.
So if things like stress, burnout, anxiety, depression, adhd or any other troubles are present, it’s quite common to also have troubles with sleep. Addressing those daytime issues and aiming for good mental fitness can often be a huge game changer for chronic sleep issues.
Living by Your Values
One of the most powerful ways to improve sleep is to align your daily actions with your values. Values are your heart’s deepest desires for how you want to treat yourself, others and the world around you.
What’s most important to you – connection, creativity, self-care? When you live in a way that reflects your values, you create a more balanced, fulfilling life, which naturally supports better sleep.
Ask Yourself:
- How can I bring more meaning into my day?
- What small steps can I take toward something that really matters to me?
Our modern culture is not very familiar with a values based life as we currently all live very goals based lives. Goals are important of course, but values add richness and fulfillment to our lives and so it doesn’t feel like it’s all a meaningless grind.
Sleep as a Bonus, Not a Goal
The reality is, sleep is unpredictable. Some nights will be better than others. But by shifting your focus from control to rest, experimenting with new approaches, and living in line with your values, sleep often improves naturally.
The trick is to stop fighting and start allowing. Sleep isn’t something you achieve through effort. It’s something that happens when you let go of control.
So tonight, as you lie down, give yourself permission to just rest – whether you sleep or not.
Want some sleeping help or look at those daytime aspects that might be influencing your poor sleep? Head down the page and hit the button to book a free discovery call with me and find out how mental health coaching can help you make things better!
