2019-12-09 What Good Sleepers Don’t Do

If you have trouble sleeping, this might not be the response you want to hear. (“Isn’t there anything I can get on Amazon Prime?” you might ask.) But the fact is, to become a better sleeper, you need to stop trying to sleep.

There’s a concept that psychologists call sleep effort, which happens when people try to force themselves to fall asleep. Anyone who’s ever attempted to will themselves into REM knows the maddening outcome: We just can’t do it.

Ease up on fixed bedtimes

This is a controversial one, but: Don’t force yourself to go to bed at a fixed bedtime. It’s a classic poor-sleeper mistake. You’re naturally going to be sleepy at different times each night due to all sorts of factors, from your sunlight exposure to how much you exercised that day.

Don’t try to sleep in

While it’s smart to be flexible with your bedtime, it’s important to be rigid with your wake-up time. Sure, it’s tempting to shoot for an extra hour of sleep after the alarm goes off, but fight the urge. Getting up early on the weekdays and then sleeping in on the weekends, for example, confuses your body’s internal clock and leads to a phenomenon called social jet lag.

Don’t try to shut off your noisy mind

There are few things more discouraging than finding yourself wide awake at 2:00 a.m., your mind racing with worries, to-dos, and the occasional bout of existential terror. The biggest mistake people make in this situation is staying in bed and trying to shut down their thoughts. Instead of counting sheep or ruminating about the unfairness of your sleep problems, simply get out of bed, put on a mindless sitcom, and return to bed when you’re sleepy. If thoughts arise, let them.

And be patient. Your body knows how to sleep, and it wants to. But when you try too hard to get there, you’re only making it harder for your body to do its job. Ease up on the effort, and trust that your body knows how to do what it’s programmed to do.