Why Trying Harder to Sleep Keeps You Awake

Perhaps you know this one. In bed since half past ten, trying to breathe more slowly, trying not to think, trying everything you have read online — and the harder you try, the wider awake you become, until on some nights it is three in the morning and you have not slept a second.

Science has a name for this: the sleep-effort paradox. The harder you work at falling asleep, the harder falling asleep becomes.

The kinds of insomnia

Before understanding why this is so difficult, it helps to know that insomnia does not come in only one form.

The first is sleep-onset insomnia — difficulty falling asleep at the start of the night, needing a long time to drop off. The second is sleep-maintenance insomnia — being able to fall asleep but waking often in the night and struggling to return. The third is waking too early and being unable to get back to sleep at all.

There is a fourth that is interesting and less widely known: paradoxical insomnia. Here a person feels they are sleeping very badly indeed, yet when measured with proper sleep monitoring, the body turns out to be sleeping something close to a normal amount. Research associates this with a distorted perception of one's own sleep state — the brain remaining in too high a state of arousal even during sleep, so that it feels like no sleep at all while the body is in fact sleeping.

This is why there is no single formula for treating insomnia that works for everyone. The root of the problem may be entirely different from one person to the next.

Why trying harder to sleep keeps you awake

Here is the heart of the matter, and it is what a great many people do not understand. Sleep is a physiological process that has to arrive on its own; it is not something willpower can produce. Most of what we accomplish in life yields to effort and analysis. Sleep works the other way round. The harder we try to control it, the more aroused the nervous system becomes.

People who have been highly successful — accustomed to solving problems through effort and careful thinking — tend to fall into this trap most easily, because they bring the same approach to a sleepless night. The more they analyze, the harder they try to take control, the more pressure they apply to themselves to sleep, the worse the result.

Anxiety about not sleeping then feeds the loop. A bad night tonight brings worry about tomorrow night; that worry raises arousal; the raised arousal produces exactly the sleeplessness that was feared. And round it goes.

The English count sheep — so what should the rest of us count?

Speaking of trying to sleep, this is hard to leave out. Most people have heard that English speakers count sheep at bedtime. One theory holds that this caught on because "sheep" and "sleep" sound so alike that the brain quietly links the two without noticing.

By that logic, counting sheep should be no use at all to a Thai speaker, since sheep and sleep have nothing to do with each other in Thai. Perhaps we should count caterpillars instead 🐛 — norn, to sleep, and non, a caterpillar, rhyme neatly, and they are rather sweeter company. Picturing round little caterpillars inching along in a slow queue is arguably more charming than sheep hurling themselves over a fence. For anyone not afraid of caterpillars, at least.

One quiet caveat, though. Sheep or caterpillars, counting may not help as much as we hope, because counting keeps the analytical part of the brain working — which returns us to the original problem of a brain that has not fully let go. Several studies suggest that picturing something still and calm, a quiet sea or a meadow where nothing moves, may work better than counting anything that has to keep moving.

In the end the trouble may not be that we are counting the wrong animal. It may be that we are still counting.

Hypnotherapy and sleeplessness

Because the central difficulty in insomnia is usually not an inability to sleep but a nervous system in too high a state of arousal, together with an effort at control that obstructs a natural process, this is precisely where hypnotherapy has something to offer. Attending to sleep hygiene remains an important foundation, but for someone caught in the sleep-effort paradox, foundations alone may not be enough.

The principle of hypnotherapy is to bring the mind into a state of deep relaxation without the kind of effort that has been applied until now. Instead of telling yourself "I have to sleep," which only adds pressure, the process guides the nervous system to settle of its own accord through suggestion and imagery — without the intention and control that produced the sleep-effort paradox in the first place.

For someone whose pattern resembles paradoxical insomnia, where the brain sits in too high a state of arousal, familiarizing the brain with a relaxed state regularly may help that overworking arousal circuit settle over time. It should be said plainly, though, that this condition is complex and warrants assessment by a sleep specialist alongside any other care.

At NBRH we hold that sleeplessness is not a matter of insufficient discipline or insufficient effort. On the contrary: very often the harder someone tries, the worse it becomes, because sleep is something to be released rather than controlled. Working with the nervous system so that it learns to relax without force is therefore the key, and it is a different thing entirely from forcing yourself to sleep.

To understand how stress works, and how the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems operate, we have written “Stress Is Not the Enemy”. And for a clearer picture of how anxiety disguised as prudence behaves in the brain, “On Anxiety Disguised as Prudence” follows that thread.