Sleep advice has become an industry. Blue light glasses. Magnesium glycinate. A ten-step wind-down routine that takes longer than the sleep you’re trying to get.
Some of it is useful. Some of it has turned sleep into a performance, one more thing to succeed or fail at. For people with genuine sleep problems, that’s often making things worse.
The anxiety loop
Persistent insomnia, lying awake for hours, or waking at 3am unable to get back down, is rarely just about sleep hygiene. It’s almost always maintained by anxiety about sleep itself.
A run of bad nights. Monitoring how tired you feel. Calculating how many hours remain if you fall asleep right now. Dreading getting into bed because you already know what’s coming. The bed stops being associated with rest and starts being associated with vigilance and frustration. This is a specific version of how anxiety works more generally.
Every new sleep tip adds to this. Each one is another thing you might do wrong. Another explanation for why the sleep didn’t come.
What the research shows
The most effective treatment for chronic insomnia is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I). It works by reducing the anxiety loop, not by optimising sleep conditions.
Key components include sleep restriction, counterintuitively, reducing time in bed to build sleep pressure, stimulus control (using the bed only for sleep, getting up when you can’t), and reducing sleep effort. The harder you try to sleep, the less likely you are to.
Practical starting points
Stop tracking sleep with a wearable for a few weeks. Sleep tracker anxiety is documented enough to have a name: orthosomnia. Granular data about something you can’t consciously control is not neutral information.
Stop calculating hours. “If I fall asleep now I’ll get five and a half hours” is an activating thought. Replace it with nothing.
Get up at the same time every day regardless of how the night went. A fixed wake time stabilises the circadian rhythm faster than almost any other single intervention. It pairs well with small, low-effort daily habits rather than a full routine change.
When it’s more than a habit
Insomnia lasting more than three months warrants a GP conversation. Sleep apnoea is significantly underdiagnosed. Anxiety and depression frequently show up first as disrupted sleep. Waking at 3am specifically is also one of the body’s early stress markers.
Good sleep is less about what you do before bed and more about what you stop doing to interfere with it.