Sleep hygiene and why it’s nonsense.
I spend several days at a time without enough sleep. At first, normal activities become annoying… A few days later, things become strange. Loud noises become louder and more startling, familiar sounds become unfamiliar, and life reinvents itself as a surrealist dream. – Henry Rollins
Dear Sleep Hygiene Expert,
Please excuse my tone of voice, but it’s 2am, I’m wide-awake and quite frankly I’m pissed off. I don’t know if it’s taboo for a counsellor to confess to difficulty with sleeping, but if anyone should understand it’s you, so here I am.
It was news to me the first time I read about sleep hygiene. Advice such as not looking at screens, not consuming sugar, making sure my room is dark and a comfortable temperature, doing exercise at THIS time and not THAT time, meditation, drinking herbal teas, buying a good pillow, getting up at the same time every day etc.
What might be news to you is that none of this sleep hygiene shit works when you actually have insomnia.
See, I have had trouble sleeping since practically forever. Mostly since puberty and the onset of PCOS. I actually can’t remember a time when I would blissfully head off to bed at a reasonable time, unable to keep my eyes open, and easily fall into a deep and restful slumber.
I was always the last one awake at the slumber party or the school camp or the school trip away. Bleary eyed teachers and volunteer parents losing their patience in the wee hours, stomping in to tell me and whoever else I’d convinced to stay up to go to sleep RIGHT NOW or Else. Although then I was having fun.
I moved out of home and in with friends at 19. I lived in many group houses over the years of university and travel. Those early 20’s years lacking in sleep were more ‘normal’ because everyone was doing it. Working odd jobs, studying into the night, partying a lot, figuring life out. Generally sleep issues are attributed to lifestyle at that age.
But now I’m in my late 30’s and here’s what I can tell you Sleep Hygiene Expert. Sleep still evades me on the semi-regular, and I have tried all your ideas.
That getting up at the same time thing? I gave it a couple of months a few years back. It didn’t seem that much of a stretch to include early-rising weekends for someone who has worked full-time for years.
But it was torturous.
In no way did having a pattern help me sleep any better on the nights when sleep just wasn’t on the cards, and I couldn’t even enjoy a catch-up on the weekend.
I don’t pretend to know what it feels like to be a new mum, but I imagine a little kinship there: the catch-up sleeps are CRUCIAL to your survival. And without the new baby vibes to warm my heart, why the hell would I keep putting myself through that when a sleep-in is sometimes the only thing the troubled sleeper can look forward to?
I know that my ability to sleep is somehow affected heavily by hormones. I have PCOS and it’s fairly common for us to have sleep disturbances. Been riding the wild hormone bus for many years. So there’s something about that.
And mate, depending on what you do for a living, there are just some nights where you FEEL it all. The work day gets to you. You’re not human if that’s never happened to you.
There are certain things that do work at certain times:
- writing all my thoughts out in a journal
- 4262 breathing exercises
- doing gentle ‘sleepy’ yoga or stretching
- consuming a very small amount of carbs just before bed (triptophan, yay)
- getting a lot of exercise during the day (rarely)
- listening to a visualisation
- reading something a little boring but also distracting
- writing a to-do list for the next day
- doing an intense ‘run on the spot’ thing for as long as I can
- playing a ‘cosy’ game on the ipad (yes!!!)
- doing the Paul McKenna hypnotherapy CD.
But then, just as easily these things don’t work. Even if I practice them. Even if I don’t give up. And even if I try my very hardest for such a long time that I end up revolving my whole life routine around the moving feast of a sleep hygiene pattern that is (a) boring (b) has zero guarantees (c) leaves the door wide-open for a personal Failure story to march on in when it doesn’t work.
Sleep Hygiene Expert, I wonder if you really truly know what it feels like to not be able to sleep on the regular?
It’s a little bit like the diet and nutrition expert who has never struggled with weight. As Lindy West says, do they honestly think that fat people don’t know we’re fat? That we know nothing about nutrition and what we’re ‘supposed’ to do?
Fat people know more than naturally slim people about weight loss, a balanced diet and exercise.
I’m willing to bet that us sleep-challenged, insomniacs and night owls are the same: “Hey Guys, shout out if you know nothing about sleep hygiene!”… crickets… thought so.
Do you have a clue what it really feels like to be looking at the clock (even though you KNOW you’re not supposed to) at 2…3…4am counting the moments until that bloody alarm is going off? You’re beating yourself up for not doing the right things in the lead up to sleep all day, and you’re doing all the tricks but tonight they just aren’t working and you’re lying there. Tossing and turning.
Then you get bored. Of yourself. Even if you weren’t feeling anxious, you start feeling anxious. Maybe you’re playing the tape of the day before, or worrying about the day ahead. Or the day from 15 years ago when you wish you’d told that horrible boss you had for one month on a temp job in Bristol how sad and petty her life was, over and over.
No Sleep becomes a bit of a Familiar Sleepless Friend (let’s call her Yawning Owl) after such a long relationship.
On the worst nights, everything seems completely unmanageable. You lie awake worrying unnecessarily about the Absolutely Straightforward Thing you have to do tomorrow. You’re visited by a million Worst Case Scenarios on any number of subjects. You can’t shut the pictures out of your head. Hoping it won’t be quite so bad in the morning is all you can tell yourself when you’re filled with despair.
Tonight it’s a Friday in April 2017 and I can’t sleep. That’s it. I can speculate for hours on why. I’m out of town and my partner isn’t here. I’m a little too warm… but not really. I watched TV a bit late… but not too late. I drove 7 hours to get here and listened to too many podcasts. And I ate some junk food, but I didn’t overdo it.
My eyelids are drooping and my eyes are stinging. There is nothing wrong but sleep is just not here tonight.
Here’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned Sleep Hygiene Expert: Sleep Interruption is just part of my life.
It’s why I don’t feel anxious tonight, just annoyed.
Because I’ve gotten through many days on little to no sleep, and while it’s not at all pleasant to drag myself out of bed and have to face a big day, I’ve always survived.
Quite often when I awaken after a late-night visit from Yawning Owl, I give myself a little pep talk: ‘Look Nicole, just get up and get started, do one thing, and then you can go home or grab a nap, I give you permission’.
You know what? I have hardly ever taken myself up on the offer. It turns out that being tired isn’t really the worst thing in the world (especially when you’re kind of an expert in it).
Sometimes I actually get a hugely amazing amount of awesome stuff done: 2nd and 3rd and 4th winds blow in and rise me well above the low tide that ebbed in the morning.
I’m used to this and I know what I’m doing. I’m enough.
Very rarely there are other times, when Yawning Owl has been a bit too busy. I start to go a little haywire and I do need to stop. I have to listen to my body, cancel the day as planned, and take care of it.
Sleep Hygiene Expert, if you ever find yourself on a 4 day no-sleep rollercoaster, here’s my expert advice. You need to take care of yourself. Take a day off work. Make a bed-fort. Buy new sheets. Watch comfy telly til you can’t anymore. Scroll mindlessly (but puppies and cute stuff only, no doom). Talk on the phone to someone you don’t have to pretend with. Do WHATEVER you need to stay sane.
And here’s the silver lining. The good thing about being awake alone at night is that lots of good ideas come to you (amidst the uninvited rumination on that terrible jerk you dated in 2003 and what you’d say to him if you ran into him now). Writers and artists and musicians and mathematicians and scientists come up with all sorts of stuff in the wee hours.
Hey, I just wrote this: the bones of a blog post that might help a few people! While I’m on the good stuff, I also attribute my love of reading to a childhood lacking in enough sleep (as well as a mum who read to me from the day I was born). How can reading a lot be a bad thing?
If I spend my whole life thinking there’s something wrong with me because of Yawning Owl then I’ll spend my whole life trying to fix it. Instead I’ve just decided at this point, after years of trying to treat her away, maybe she’s with me for the long haul.
I accept that a combination of circumstances, biology, and choices make me a proud Occasional Non-Sleeper. And I am enough.
That doesn’t mean I won’t sagely keep an awareness of your advice Sleep Hygiene Expert: It’s good stuff. But I’m not going to revolve my entire life around turning off the blue lights, creating the ‘exact’ right atmosphere, getitng up when I can’t sleep and not using the bedroom for anything but sleep and sex, only to feel like a Big Failure when it doesn’t work.
Or even worse: not be able to enjoy a holiday because I can’t recreate the perfect atmosphere in a rickety bed with a mosquito net thrown over it on a beautiful island in Indonesia.
If a good nights sleep ever comes easily to me night after night after night then I’m not gonna lie: I’ll be OVER THE MOON. But truthfully, I have absolutely no concept of what that would feel like, and you can’t really miss what you never knew.
In writing this letter to you, I guess I’m not so pissed off after all Sleep Hygiene Expert. Your failings are not entirely your fault. They are the result of a system that blames folks for their struggles when they can’t offer genuine solutions to hard problems.
But I’m choosing to give you less power, and choosing to give the old ‘You’re not so bad after all’ to my faithful Yawning Owl instead.
And guess what? Tomorrow there’s a thunderstorm due in… I might sleep until 12pm, and I won’t feel bad about it for even one minute.
But right now I’m going to switch off the light and count sheep down from 300 at intervals of 7.
Hey, sometimes it works.
Did you find yourself cheering along with this cranky girl blog post? Then jump on my list to get more like it (or not so much like it as i’m not usually writing them in this kind of mood, but sometimes we gotta speak our minds don’t we?)
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Main image by Naomi August; owl picture by Kaz
I’ve been offering online relationship coaching, online life coaching, and online counselling services for many years. With a Masters in narrative therapy and 20+ years in the field, I’m pretty good at 
helping people navigate tricky life-turns. Not to mention a heck of a lot of travel and living as a digital nomad myself. If you think I might be the right person to help unstick you from a tricky spot, don’t hesitate to reach out and start a conversation with me.
If you want to go deeper into self-discovery, courage and rewriting your personal story, you might also love my ebook ‘Bolder: A Real-World Guide for People Who Are Tired of Faking Confidence‘. Available on all ebook platforms.
I have never been a good sleeper since childhood. Recently I was prescribed pharceutical grade liquid melatonin and it is the fucking bomb! I sometimes combine with Damiana tea. Also experiencing estrogen dominance and also having mild PCO I have found bioidentical progesterone (made from yams) also really helpful. This was a prescription from an integrative practioner. There is also a connection between gut health and sleep and parasites. So making sure gut Flora is balanced will aid sleep (insert pre and pro biotics) the sleep hygeniests fail to relate that often sleep disturbance is linked to hormones and physical health. Also being a counsellor for young people I can safely say they pretty much think sleep hygiene is bullshit too 🙂 great honest refreshing post Nicole thanks! Xx
What interesting and thoughtful advice Anne-Marie. I didn’t even know liquid melatonin was a thing. I believe we need to balance what we ‘actually’ know about the physical with the mental and emotional. I find hormones to be a regular influence in many people’s ways of being in the world. I have had many insightful conversations with transgender friends and colleagues who can speak in great detail about the differences (and the sames) that occurred once they started taking hormones. Thank you so much for your helpful offering and words of support :).
Great post Nicole! My take on Sleep Hygiene is that it can solve some problems for some people, especially those who might not immediately see the link between overstimulating themselves just before they try to sleep, and the sleep they ultimately get. But I also feel that medicine is uneasy with an incomplete solution, so Sleep Hygiene gets over-sold as The Answer to sleep problems, and used as a blaming checklist if you aren’t following all of the recommendations.
I don’t usually sleep more that 6 hours, but find a wind-down routine helps me ease into sleep. But hey, I’m in my mid-50’s and my life can feel like a wind-down routine…
You are so right Tim, I’ve been a bit hard on the old sleep hygiene expert. As you say, and I hope is apparent in my post, the advice is certainly not bad. It’s just the assumption that you are doing something ‘wrong’ if you’re not following the checklist, or that you don’t know anything about sleep hygiene every single time you mention to a professional that you have trouble sleeping. There are times when you just think ‘bugger the list!!!!!’ which is how I felt when I wrote the post. You must be escaping the old checklist yourself with 6 hours sleep a night. Recognising that we have our own patterns is also ok in my book (mine tends to be 5-6 hrs sleep for a few nights in a row, then a 10 hour sleep, occasional visits from Yawning Owl notwithstanding). Also noticing that it might change due to age, illness, emotional experiences etc. Thanks for sharing!
Great post. So much yes. I find myself overthinking all these ‘sleep hygiene’ recommendations and just adds to my anxiety around sleeping.
Something simple (and I am also grateful it’s readily available for me!) is looking to my partner for help. He is a good sleeper and I find trying to go to sleep when he does and focusing on his breath and trying to match mine with his incredibly soothing and helps me to doze off. I supppose looking for a relational solution is more helpful to me at this point in my life. It doesn’t work all the time and I still consider myself a night owl who does her best work at night, but I try not to overthink it all. I once made an impromptu ragu at 2am to slow cook for 15+ hours – a delicious result of insomnia!
This is an absolutely beautiful example of a kind of co-regulation Brighde. Sometimes people worry that they are too reliant on ‘another’ but actually we are creatures of attachment and we are constantly in relation to one another. Problems can occur when we cannot cope at all without a particular other, but recognising that we do need other people, and in this lovely way you’ve mentioned here, is a good thing in my book. And it’s great to hear about the times when you’re stuck awake that the occasional first class meal makes it on the table! I wonder if anyone else cooks or bakes when their Yawning Owl is keeping them up?
This post really spoke to me, thank you Nicole. I often get really frustrated by articles on sleep hygiene because in my experience it simply doesn’t work!! Despite ‘ticking all the boxes’ I still end up lying in bed waiting to fall asleep for several hours each night and struggle with daytime fatigue. This makes me feel like I have failed even though I have done everything they said! I am slowly coming to the realisation that this might just be the way my body works and I am grateful for others who share similar experiences. My go to method passing the time is to try to chronologically remember each scene of the film Thor Ragnorok 🙂
I’m so glad this piece resonated Lauren. And as for your go-to method, LOVE IT! I’d love to compile a list or a ‘bedside book’ of all the wierd and wonderfully unique ways we deal when Night Owl is just too loud. I’m going to try this one (after I watch the film that is). Thank you.
If I get given another bloody sheet of A4 paper with sleep hygiene written on it I will scream!
Wow, I never thought of having the bedroom lights low or not drinking coffee before bedtime. How stupid of me. Do they really believe we haven’t tried these thing before?
The more we pander to our insomnia by inventing routines to placate it the more attention it gets and the stronger it gets. I have actually told it to piss off before. said it out loud as I lay there, but I think it enjoyed the attention I gave it.
There isn’t a device or relaxation tape or pill I haven’t tried to get some sleep. Nothing works.
One night I lay there with an ‘insomnia’ eye mask on listening to whale sounds while sipping camomile tea. The absurdity of it made me burst out laughing.
The nearest I got to a ‘real’ nights sleep was after reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in the native Russian language. (Insomnia was a blessing compared to that).
I have come to the conclusion insomnia is just part of being me. Fighting it just doesn’t work.
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I’m about two years late, but nice post. Sleep hygiene therapy is useless. I spent years going through all kinds of this pseudoscientific crap before the doctors pretty much gave up sent me for a sleep study. Turns out sleep hygiene doesn’t fix CSA, DSPD, or night terrors… Who would have thought.
I’m disturbed by how many medical professionals seem to rely on unproven, ineffective, or inappropriate treatments for certain conditions, and how often they will force you to repeat said treatments. Physical therapy is a great example of this. It’s effective for some things, of course, but there are other conditions that absolutely do not improve with PT. How do I know this? Well, let’s see… There’s the kinesiology /exercise science background, and then there’s the fact that I went through PT 6 times for a congenital deformity.
But anyway, this is a problem that doesn’t seem to be limited to sleep medicine.
I’ve had insomnia on and off (mostly on) since I was two. I’m 39 now.
No doctor will take me seriously. Sleep hygiene was suggested and doesn’t work. I tried to set a routine and even when it works I wake up random times even at my best. I used to sleep in odd shifts which is what my body prefers yet tried to create the routine.
I rarely have a full night. Routine has gone out if the window since I moved to my own place. The walls and floors here are thin. Front door loud. My neighbor is always up all night and has people over and I can hear them through earplugs and background noise. I live in a bedsit. So much for routine.
4:30 and here we go again. They woke me up at 2:30. I’m supposed to be in autistic friendly housing.
I think I’m screwed. Well I’ll get peace when I die I guess.
Hi spacecat. Goodness it’s a wild messy horrible ride isn’t it?! Sleep hygiene is such a woefully inadequate response to people with serious sleep issues, I really feel you on this. Let alone dealing with noisy neighbours (I find loud neighbour noise annoys me a lot more than my partner, it really grates inside my skull and i can’t tune it out, do you find that?) I imagine if you’re in autistic-friendly housing then you’re on the spectrum, so extra-sensitive to noises, i’m so sorry to hear that noise is not a crucial factor in how your housing has been located and designed, terrible.
Recently I have found, for myself, after reading a book by Dr Fiona McCulloch on my condition PCOS, that taking the supplement Myo-inositol has dramatically changed my sleeping habits. For the first time in my life I sleep through the night and have less trouble getting to sleep. All the ‘sleep hygiene’ in the world can’t fix a medical condition. Apparently neither can medicine.
Perhaps it’s worth seeing a Naturopath and getting a thorough assessment based on your personal needs, seeing if there are supplements or dietary changes that might address fluxes in hormones/anxiety/bodily functioning?
I wish the best for you and hope those damn neighbours quieten down or your housing addresses this issue.
I was waking up at 2-4 am and wasn’t sleeping well. I felt like I was punishing myself with sleep hygiene that didn’t work. I was barely doing my job and a miserable one at that. I’m on a combination of sleep pills and sleep do want feels right to me now. I needed this article.