Why Trying to Fall Asleep Keeps You Awake

The 8-hour rule is a myth, catching up on sleep doesn't work, and the counterintuitive technique that actually does.

This week's piece comes with something new. I built The 7-Day Sleep Reset: a proper protocol based on clinical insomnia research and behaviour design, with 15 printable tools and the worksheets I use with actual coaching clients. The guide is the full 7-day programme and it’s $17. If you want the one technique that changed everything for me, plus one experiment to try tonight, keep reading.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been teaching a human-centred design course to 70 adult learners in Singapore, from Latin America.

Which means evenings, 8pm to midnight, and a lot of coffee at 10pm to keep my energy up for a room full of people 12 hours ahead of me.

I do this a few times a year and used to do it without a second thought when I lived in Singapore, but now that I’m on the other side of the world it means my whole schedule flips.

A few weeks of late nights, stacked on top of my legaltech work, stacked on top of my Unwritten work and I’ve honestly been feeling like I’ve been reassembled slightly wrong.

The funny thing is, I used to live like this all the time.

Go out, drink 2 bottles of wine until stupid o’clock, get to work on a few hours of sleep, do it again.

For years. I didn’t think about sleep because I didn’t think sleep was something you could be good or bad at. It was just the gap between going out and going to work.

These days, few things make me feel more like I’ve got my shit together than being in bed by 10:30pm, warm shower done, some ginger tea, reading a page or two of a book before I turn the light off.

Waking up fresh. Full of energy. That quiet feeling of: yep, I’m doing alright.

It sounds boring. It is boring. It’s also one of the best things I’ve ever done for my health.

So when 3 weeks of teaching across timezones blew that up, I did notice.

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The 1am brain showed up. The internal monologue kicked in: You’re going to feel terrible tomorrow. You’ve undone all your progress. What is wrong with you?

Coffee at 10pm basically shuts your melatonin down, so you’re tired but wired.

And your prefrontal cortex, the bit that’s supposed to help you make sensible decisions, is barely online.

So the day after a bad night is the day you’re least equipped to make good decisions about food, exercise, or anything else.

My HRV was all over the place. And every morning my Garmin cheerfully informed me that my body battery was low and my sleep score was terrible.

I talk all the time about not being a slave to the data on your wrist, not obsessively optimising every metric. I am also still a human being who wakes up, sees a bad number, and immediately feels stressed about it.

The irony is not lost on me…

I ate like absolute shit. And that's not a willpower thing, by the way. Even one bad night triggers a rise in ghrelin (your hunger hormone). Your body thinks something has gone wrong and starts screaming for calories.

Helpful.

The 8-hour lie

While we’re here. The number that made all of this worse: eight.

Eight hours, every night, or you’re failing at the most basic human function. Cool. No pressure.

Adults need roughly 7 to 8 hours, but the number varies wildly from person to person. And here’s the bit that actually matters: a 2023 study tracked tens of thousands of people using wearable data and found that how regular your sleep is matters more than how long you sleep. Regularity was a stronger predictor of early death than total hours.

Let that land for a second.

You don’t have to nail the number. You can improve regularity, improve your wind-down, improve the conditions. Those gains count even if you’re nowhere near 8 hours on the dot.

The other myth worth killing: catching up.

Bad week, so you’ll sleep in at the weekend feels logical. I believed that for years.

But the research keeps landing in the same place: consistency beats compensation.

Sleeping in on Sunday doesn’t fix a week of bad sleep. It actually makes Monday night harder because you’ve shifted your body clock. (I know, I know. Annoying.)

What helped me more than obsessing over hours was accepting that the 3 weeks of teaching were going to disrupt things, and focusing on getting back to my routine once it was done.

Not panicking about the lost sleep. Not trying to “catch up.” Just returning to the routine that works.

The technique that actually helped

You already know the standard sleep hygiene list.

Blue light bad. Bedroom cool and dark. Caffeine. Screens, blah blah blah. I’m not going to rehash it.

The technique that actually changed my relationship with sleepless nights comes from psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s clinical work on insomnia, and it sounds ridiculous.

Try to stay awake.

I’m serious. It’s called paradoxical intention.

The harder you try to fall asleep, the more performance anxiety you create.

You’re lying there monitoring yourself: am I sleepy yet? Is this working? It’s been twenty minutes. Why isn’t this working?

Every check-in sends a little spike of alertness through your nervous system. Which is obviously not helpful if what you’re trying to do is very much not to be alert.

So you flip it!

Lie in bed with the lights off, keep your eyes open, and give up any effort to fall asleep. When your eyelids get heavy, gently tell yourself: just stay awake for another couple of minutes.

That’s it.

It works because the thing keeping you awake isn’t the noise or the temperature. It’s the desperate effort to sleep.

The moment you stop trying, your nervous system calms down and sleep shows up on its own. It’s like a cat that only sits on your lap when you stop reaching for it (and the reason I’m more of a dog person myself).

It’s been tested properly since, and it works. Especially for the performance anxiety part, which is the whole problem.

I do this all the time when I’m struggling to fall asleep, or if I wake up in the middle of the night and struggle to get back to sleep.

I put on my sleep buds, an episode of the podcast Stuff You Should Know at the minimum volume, set a sleep timer to the end of the episode, et voila!

I’m usually asleep within a few minutes.

Your experiment this week

Tonight, pick one Rooted Routine.

Choose something you already do every evening and attach one small sleep-friendly action to it.

After I brush my teeth, I’ll put my phone in the other room. Or: After I get into bed, I’ll do 5 slow breaths. Or: After I turn off the light, I’ll run through 3 things that went well today.

Same format every time: after I [thing I already do], I will [tiny new thing].

You’re designing the behaviour into your evening so it doesn’t rely on motivation at 10pm when you’ve got nothing left.

If your routine got disrupted recently (say, by 3 weeks of teaching across timezones), this is how you rebuild. One anchor at a time.

That’s it. One Rooted Routine. Hold it for a week.

If you want the full programme (7 days of structured tools, thought worksheets for the 2am spiral, a paradoxical intention bedside card, a caffeine and alcohol tracker, and a before-and-after assessment), I built it. It's called The 7-Day Sleep Reset and it's $17.

And if it all falls apart and you still have a terrible night? One bad night is one bad night. Get up at your normal time. Resist the nap. Let your body reset.

I’m writing this from the other side of those 3 weeks. Back to my 10:30pm bedtime.

Back to the warm shower and the ginger tea and the quiet smugness of waking up before my alarm. It came back faster than I expected. The design held, even when I couldn’t follow it.

With love from a much more reasonable timezone,
Noemie x

P.S. What’s your 1am brain’s favourite lie? Mine is you’re behind on everything and you’re going to feel like shit tomorrow and somehow everyone else is handling it better than you.. Classic catastrophising with a side of comparison. Hit reply and tell me yours!

Noemie Mooney is an ACE Certified Health Coach, ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist, podcast host and the creator of the MAKE SPACE Method™, a science-backed framework for sustainable habits and mental health. She writes on Substack about burnout, habit formation, and evidence-based behaviour change psychology for people who want practical tools without the self-help BS.

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