The sleep mistake you keep making because you’re exhausted

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that makes you desperate to sleep. You get into bed determined that tonight will be different. You calculate how many hours you could get if you fall asleep immediately. You notice that you’re still awake. You wonder why it’s taking so long. And suddenly, something that should happen naturally has become a task.

According to sleep expert and psychotherapist Heather Darwall-Smith, this can be one of the biggest traps for people struggling with insomnia. “The more we focus on sleep,” she says, “the more it can become problematic.”

It sounds strange. Surely if sleep is the problem, paying more attention to it should help? But sleep isn’t something you can simply order yourself to do. And the harder you try to control an unconscious process, the more pressure you can create around it.

When bedtime becomes something to fear

For some people, the problem goes beyond frustration. “I work with people who are terrified of going to sleep,” Darwall-Smith says. “Properly, the prospect of it is so frightening. They just want to get it over with.”

That can turn bedtime into an emotional event. Instead of anticipating rest, you anticipate another difficult night. Instead of getting into bed and letting yourself drift off, you’re watching yourself for signs that sleep is happening. And if it isn’t happening quickly enough, anxiety can begin to build.

Darwall-Smith says there is often much more underneath this fear than simply not wanting to be tired the next day. Perhaps you’ve had months of poor sleep and are frightened about what another bad night will mean. Perhaps you’re worried about functioning at work, looking after your family or simply getting through the following day.

The bed can gradually become associated with all of those fears.

The perfectionism problem

Darwall-Smith sees another pattern frequently among people with insomnia: perfectionism. “Probably 80% of my clients with insomnia have perfectionist tendencies,” she says.

That doesn’t necessarily mean someone is outwardly demanding or ambitious. It can be a much quieter internal expectation: I should be able to get this right. And if you don’t, you start looking for what you did wrong.

Darwall-Smith links this to our desire for control. “If you’ve got this need, ‘I’ve always got to be on. I’ve always got to be perfect. I’ve always got to perform’,” she says, “well, how are you going to do that?”

Sleep exposes the problem with that mindset because it can’t be controlled in the same way as a work task or a diary. You can prepare for sleep, but you can’t summon it at will.

Stop turning sleep into a performance

This is why Darwall-Smith is wary of approaches that make people increasingly preoccupied with whether they’re sleeping “correctly”.

There are endless rules about sleep. The right bedtime. The right temperature. The right routine. The right number of hours.

Some advice can be useful, but for someone already anxious about sleep, an ever-growing list of things to get right can become another source of pressure. The irony is that the person trying hardest to sleep may be the person least able to relax into it.

Darwall-Smith’s work is less about finding the perfect formula and more about changing the relationship someone has with sleep.

Part of that means accepting that sleep isn’t necessarily identical every night. There will be nights when you sleep brilliantly and nights when you don’t.

Darwall-Smith describes it as “very, very hard work to manage this thing that happens that puts us in an unconscious state”.

The challenge is to resist making that unconscious process another test, and to accept that a change in your sleep doesn’t automatically mean something has gone badly wrong.

Try changing the question

The instinct when you can’t sleep is usually: How can I make myself sleep?

Darwall-Smith suggests a different way of approaching the problem. Perhaps the most useful question isn’t How do I make myself sleep?

It’s How can I stop making sleep something I have to get right?

For someone caught in the cycle of sleeplessness, that small change in perspective could be the beginning of a very different relationship with bedtime.

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