One of the strangest things about sleep is that the more desperately we want it, the harder it can become to achieve. I have seen this thousands of times in my clinical work.
A client will tell me they did everything right. They went to bed at the right time, put their phone away, practised their breathing, relaxed their body and tried to clear their mind. Then they'll say, "And I was still awake for hours."
The problem isn't that they weren't trying hard enough. It's that sleep doesn't respond particularly well to effort.
Most things in life reward effort. If you want to get fitter, you train. If you want to learn something, you study. If you have a problem at work, you try to solve it. So when sleep becomes difficult, it's completely natural to apply the same approach.
But sleep is different. It's a natural biological process that requires us to relinquish conscious control. The moment we start trying to make sleep happen, we also start monitoring whether our efforts are working. Am I sleepy yet? Why am I still awake? How many hours do I have left?
Suddenly, sleep has become a performance.
With performance comes pressure. With pressure comes anxiety. And with anxiety comes greater mental and physical alertness, exactly the opposite of what we need for sleep.
This is one of the great paradoxes of chronic insomnia. The thing you desperately want requires you to stop trying so hard to achieve it.
That doesn't mean telling yourself you don't care about sleep. If you desperately do care, your brain will see straight through that. Instead, much of my work with clients involves learning to let go of the struggle with the moment they're actually experiencing.
If you're awake, can you allow yourself to be awake? If your mind is racing, can those thoughts be there without needing to silence them? If anxiety is present, can you make some space for it rather than immediately trying to make it disappear?
This isn't another technique designed to trick yourself into sleeping. It's about developing a different relationship with wakefulness.
And something interesting often happens when we stop treating being awake as a problem that needs to be solved immediately. The pressure begins to soften. The nervous system has less reason to remain on high alert. We create something that sleep desperately needs. Space to arrive on its own.
Written by Dr Guy Meadows (PhD) - Insomnia Specialist
Listen to this blog
