You’ve probably heard the usual sleep advice.
Keep your bedroom cool and dark. Avoid caffeine too late in the day. Avoid screens. Keep a regular sleep schedule.
Those things matter. But sometimes you’ve done all the “right” things and you’re still lying there awake.
Maybe your brain is replaying something that happened earlier. Maybe you’re mentally writing tomorrow’s to-do list, trying to solve a problem, or checking the time and calculating how many hours of sleep you could get if you fell asleep right now.
Or maybe there isn’t an obvious reason. You’re tired. You want to sleep. You just can’t.
An occasional difficult night doesn’t necessarily mean you have insomnia. Most people have trouble sleeping sometimes. But even an occasional sleepless night can be frustrating, especially when you’re lying awake wondering what to do with yourself.
This isn’t another sleep hygiene checklist.
Instead, it’s a collection of things you can experiment with when sleep isn’t happening. You don’t need to try all of them, and there isn’t a particular order you’re supposed to follow. Different things may be useful on different nights, depending on what’s keeping you awake.
And none of them is a test of whether you’re doing it right.
When trying harder doesn’t help
Sleep is a strange thing to work hard at.
When you’re awake and desperately want to sleep, trying harder can feel like the obvious response. You might deliberately try to empty your mind, make your body relax, check whether you’re getting sleepy yet, or calculate how much time you have left before morning.
The problem is that sleep isn’t something we can force ourselves to do on command.
The more sleep starts to feel like a task, the easier it can become to monitor whether you’re succeeding at it:
Am I relaxed yet?
Why am I still awake?
Was I almost asleep just then?
If I fall asleep now, I can still get five hours…
Now you’re not only awake. You’re also working at not being awake.
That doesn’t mean you should stop wanting to sleep, or that it doesn’t matter whether you get enough sleep. Sleep matters, and ongoing sleep difficulties can have a real impact on how you feel and function.
But on a night when sleep isn’t coming easily, adding more pressure doesn’t necessarily help.
Sometimes it’s more useful to think about what’s keeping you up right now.
What is keeping you awake right now?
You may not always know. Sometimes you’re just awake.
But other times, noticing what your mind or body is doing can help you decide what might be worth trying.
The goal isn’t to identify the “right” strategy or work your way through a list. Think of these as experiments. Try something that seems to fit, adapt it if you want to, or leave it entirely if it isn’t useful.
If your brain is trying to remember everything
Sometimes your brain keeps returning to something because it’s trying to make sure you don’t forget it.
Try writing it down.
It might be tomorrow’s to-do list, something you need to remember, or whatever your brain keeps bringing back to your attention. You don’t need to organize the thoughts or make them complete before writing them down.
Keep a notebook beside your bed, use a notes app, or make a voice note. Once it’s somewhere you can find it again, you don’t have to keep rehearsing it in your head.
The point isn’t to finish anything. It’s just to put it somewhere you can come back to tomorrow.
If your brain is trying to solve something
Other times, your brain isn’t trying to remember something. It’s trying to figure something out.
Maybe you’re rehearsing a conversation. Maybe you’re thinking through a decision, planning how you’ll handle something tomorrow, or trying to solve a problem that doesn’t have an obvious answer.
Unfinished problems can be hard to put down. When something doesn’t have a conclusion yet, your mind may keep returning to it, looking for one.
If there’s something you can actually do about it tomorrow, try identifying one next step and writing it down. You don’t need to make the whole plan. Sometimes knowing what happens next can take enough pressure off the problem that you can leave the rest for tomorrow.
If there isn’t anything you can do right now, you can decide to put the problem down for now and come back to it tomorrow.
That doesn’t mean the problem isn’t important. It means you don’t have to solve it before you can rest.
If your mind keeps going back to the same thing
Sometimes a thought, memory, worry, or conversation keeps returning even when there’s nothing you need to remember or solve.
Trying to force a thought away can sometimes make you pay even more attention to whether it’s still there. Instead, you might experiment with changing what you do when the thought shows up.
Leaves on a Stream is an exercise often used in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Imagine you’re relaxing at the edge of a stream. You might picture a forest, a field, or another setting that feels calming to you. Picture placing one thought on a leaf and watching it float downstream. When another thought appears, put that one on another leaf.
You aren’t trying to empty your mind or stop thoughts from appearing. If you notice you’ve started following one particular thought, notice that, and return to watching the leaves.
The Container Exercise is an exercise often used in EMDR. It involves putting thoughts away for now into an imaginary container. You can choose any container you want, such as a box, drawer, folder, suitcase, or somewhere else that makes sense to you. You might spend some time envisioning the details of your container. Then, imagine yourself putting the thoughts into your container, and putting it away somewhere safe.
This is a little different from watching a thought pass. Sometimes the thought is about something you really do need or want to return to, just not at 2:00 in the morning. You’re not getting rid of it or deciding it doesn’t matter. You’re deciding when you want to pick it up again.
If your brain just needs something else to do
Sometimes there isn’t one particular thought keeping you awake. Your brain is just busy.
Giving your attention something else to do can be worth experimenting with.
A cognitive shuffle is one exercise you might try. Choose a word and use each letter of the word to think of unrelated things.
For example, if you choose the word CLOUD, you might picture:
cat → lighthouse → orange → umbrella → dinosaur
Picture each thing briefly, then move on. There isn’t a story to follow or a sequence to remember, and you don’t need to work through the entire word. There’s no perfect way to do this. It’s just one way of giving your attention somewhere relatively undemanding to go when your thoughts are keeping you occupied.
Try something familiar and low-demand: a bedtime story, quiet music, or the audio from a show or movie you already know. Familiarity can be useful here. The idea is to find something that holds your attention without being so interesting that you stay awake to find out what happens next.
If you’re using a screen for the audio, try turning the screen off, covering it, or pointing it away.
If your body is having trouble settling
Not every sleep difficulty involves thoughts. Sometimes the body is the culprit. You don’t need to force yourself to relax.
Instead, you might try a mindfulness exercise. Try noticing where your body is being supported or is in contact with the environment: the weight of your head against the pillow, where your body meets the mattress, the weight of the blankets, or the texture or temperature of the sheets. Notice how it feels to be held by the bed. Notice the movement or temperature of the air in the room. Notice the feel of the air as you breathe.
There’s nothing you need to change. You don’t have to breathe differently, release every tense muscle, or try to make yourself feel calm.
Just notice what’s there.
If your body feels tense or restless
If tension itself is noticeable, you might experiment with progressive muscle relaxation.
Choose one area of your body and gently tense those muscles for a few seconds, then release them as completely as you can. Move through different areas at whatever pace feels comfortable, noticing the difference between tension and release.
You don’t need to worry about getting rid of all the tension, and you don’t need to work through every muscle group.
Deliberately tensing muscles won’t be comfortable or appropriate for everyone. Skip any area that hurts or doesn’t feel good, or skip the exercise entirely if it isn’t a good fit for your body.
If you keep checking the time
Most of us are familiar with sleep math:
If I fall asleep now, I’ll still get five hours.
Now it’s four and a half.
How am I going to function tomorrow?
Checking the time once because you genuinely need to know it is one thing. Repeatedly checking can turn the night into a countdown, with each glance providing another opportunity to calculate how little sleep time remains.
If you notice yourself doing this, try taking the clock out of the equation. Turn the clock away, cover the display, or put your phone somewhere you can’t easily keep checking it.
Allow your alarm to keep track of the time, so you don’t have to.
If lying in bed is becoming a battle
Sometimes, staying in bed and trying harder to sleep can make the bed itself start to feel like a place for being awake, frustrated, or watching for sleep to happen.
If you've been awake for a while and lying there is becoming increasingly frustrating, try changing what you're doing for a bit.
That might mean getting out of bed and doing something quiet in low light, then returning when you start to feel sleepy again. You could read something familiar or not particularly gripping, listen to quiet music or an audiobook, do some simple drawing or colouring, work on a puzzle, fold laundry, or make yourself a caffeine-free drink.
It doesn't have to be a designated sleep activity, and you don't need to deliberately bore yourself. Something familiar, repetitive, or mildly absorbing may be enough. The idea is to choose something that doesn't require much from you and isn't likely to pull you into something you suddenly want to keep doing for the next three hours.
But getting out of bed isn't practical or safe for everyone. If pain, disability, mobility, dizziness, fall risk, caregiving responsibilities, or something else makes getting up difficult, you can change the activity without necessarily changing where you are.
You might sit up or change position, turn on some quiet audio, read for a while, or do another low-demand activity that feels different from actively trying to fall asleep.
There isn't a specific number of minutes you need to wait before doing this. Watching the clock to make sure you've been awake “long enough” can easily become another version of sleep math.
The idea is less about following a rule and more about noticing when lying there has turned into working at sleep. Changing what you're doing can give you a break from that struggle. If you do get out of bed, you can return when you feel sleepy or when going back to bed feels right.
What if none of these things work?
There are lots of reasons sleep can be difficult, and different things may help at different times. This isn’t an exhaustive list, and you certainly don’t need to work your way through it at 3:00 a.m. like a troubleshooting manual.
If something isn’t helping, stop. Change it. Try something else. Or decide you’re done trying things for tonight.
And if you still don’t fall asleep, that doesn’t mean you chose the wrong strategy or did it incorrectly.
Sometimes it can help to acknowledge that this may just be a difficult night. You may be tired tomorrow, and tomorrow may be harder because of it. If that happens, you can decide then what you need.
You don’t have to solve tomorrow tonight.
Accepting that possibility doesn’t mean you want it to happen or that sleep doesn’t matter. It just means you don’t have to spend the rest of the night fighting with the possibility that it might.
Sometimes, rest can be enough for now.
That doesn’t mean rest and sleep are the same thing. They aren’t, and getting enough sleep matters. But if sleep isn’t happening at this particular moment, you don’t have to turn resting into another attempt to make it happen.
The point isn’t to stop hoping for sleep. It’s to take some of the pressure off of getting there.
When bedtime strategies aren’t enough
There are many reasons sleep can become difficult. Stress, an unfamiliar environment, illness, pain, changes in routine, excitement about something coming up, or a mind that has inexplicably chosen bedtime to review your entire life can all interfere with sleep.
But when sleep trouble keeps happening, is causing significant distress, or is affecting how you function during the day, it’s worth talking with a healthcare provider.
When does difficulty sleeping become insomnia?
Insomnia is more than occasionally lying awake when you’d rather be sleeping.
Chronic insomnia disorder involves ongoing difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking earlier than intended despite having adequate opportunity for sleep. The difficulties typically occur at least three nights per week for at least three months and cause significant distress or affect daytime functioning.
Those criteria can be useful for understanding what clinicians mean by chronic insomnia. They aren’t rules about how long you need to struggle before asking for help.
You don’t have to wait three months to talk with someone about your sleep.
Sleep difficulties can have many contributors. Stress, anxiety, difficult experiences, pain, medications, health conditions, changes in sleep schedules or routines, and other sleep disorders can all be part of the picture. Sometimes multiple things are contributing.
An assessment can help move the question from “What else should I try?” to “What might be contributing to this?”
What about treatment for insomnia?
If you do have persistent insomnia, treatment involves more than collecting increasingly elaborate bedtime tips.
Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is considered a first-line treatment for chronic insomnia. It includes several components that address the thoughts, behaviours, and patterns that can maintain sleep difficulties. Sleep hygiene may be included as part of broader treatment, but sleep hygiene advice by itself isn’t considered an adequate treatment for chronic insomnia.
That’s also why this article isn’t intended to be a DIY version of CBT-I. Some components of CBT-I are best individualized, and what makes sense for one person may not make sense for another.
The strategies in this article are exactly what they claim to be: things you can try when sleep isn’t happening.
Sometimes that’s enough for the night. Sometimes it isn’t.
Knowing when you need more support is not another sleep task you have to get right.
When stress, anxiety, or difficult experiences are part of the picture
Sometimes sleep difficulty is connected to what’s happening outside the bedroom.
You may notice that your mind becomes busier when the day gets quiet. Worries that were easier to push aside while you were occupied may become harder to ignore. A difficult conversation may replay. Your body may still feel tense or alert even though the immediate demands of the day are over.
In those situations, the question may become broader than, How do I make myself fall asleep?
It might be useful to explore what keeps showing up when things get quiet, what your mind or body seems to be responding to, and what might help outside of bedtime as well as during it.
Therapy is one place to explore those questions, particularly when stress, anxiety, or difficult experiences are part of the picture. It doesn’t replace medical assessment when that’s needed, and not every sleep problem is a therapy problem.
But sometimes understanding what’s keeping you awake begins with understanding what you’re carrying into the night.
You don’t need to figure all of that out tonight, either.
References
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When what you’re carrying is making it harder to sleep, therapy can help you understand what’s keeping you up and explore what might help.
Healing begins with connection.