You know that feeling. You’re lying in bed, eyes closed, trying your absolute hardest to fall asleep. You’re thinking about sleep. Willing yourself to sleep. Maybe even getting frustrated that you’re not asleep yet. And somehow, the harder you try, the more awake you feel.
I’ve been there too. Lying there, mentally pushing myself to just relax already, getting more tense with every passing minute. It’s one of those frustrating paradoxes where the thing you want most slips further away the more you chase it.
This is what sleep experts call sleep performance anxiety, but really it’s just the simple truth that you can’t force sleep to happen. The more pressure you put on yourself to fall asleep, the more you guarantee you’ll stay awake.
Why Trying Harder Makes It Worse
Sleep isn’t something you do. It’s something that happens to you when conditions are right. You can’t force it any more than you can force yourself to digest food faster or make your heart beat slower through sheer willpower.
When you lie there trying hard to fall asleep, your brain interprets that effort as a sign that something important is happening. Effort means you’re working on something. Working on something means you need to be alert. Alert is the opposite of asleep.
Your trying creates this low-level stress response in your body. Even though you’re lying still with your eyes closed, your nervous system picks up on the tension. The mental pressure, the worry about not sleeping, the frustration building with each minute. All of that keeps your system just activated enough to prevent sleep from arriving.
The Performance Anxiety Spiral
Once sleep becomes something you’re worried about, it creates this spiral that’s hard to break out of. You had one bad night, so now you’re anxious about tonight. That anxiety makes tonight harder. Another rough night makes tomorrow night even more stressful.
You start watching the clock, calculating how many hours of sleep you’ll get if you fall asleep right now. The numbers get more depressing, which makes you more anxious, which makes sleep even less likely.
Your bed stops feeling like a place of rest and starts feeling like a place where you struggle and fail to sleep. Just getting into bed triggers anxiety.
What Your Body Actually Needs
Here’s the shift that helps: your body already knows how to sleep. You’ve been doing it your whole life. You don’t need to try harder or do it better. You need to get out of your own way and let it happen.
Sleep comes when your body feels safe enough and relaxed enough for consciousness to fade. That’s it. Not when you try the hardest or follow all the rules perfectly. When you stop trying so hard.
This doesn’t mean you stop caring about sleep or abandon all your bedtime practices. It means you shift from effort to allowing. From forcing to inviting.
Letting Go of the Outcome
The most helpful thing you can do is release your attachment to falling asleep. I know that sounds backwards. You want to sleep better, and I’m telling you to stop caring so much about whether you sleep.
But that’s actually the key. When sleep becomes this high-stakes thing you must achieve, you create the very tension that prevents it. When you can genuinely be okay with whether sleep comes or not, you remove the pressure that’s been keeping you awake.
This might look like telling yourself, “If I sleep tonight, great. If I don’t, I’ll still be okay.” Taking the catastrophe out of not sleeping. Reminding yourself that one difficult night won’t ruin your life.
What to Do When You’re Awake
Instead of treating being awake as a failure that must be fixed immediately, try treating it as just being awake. Not good or bad, just what’s happening right now.
If you’ve been lying there for 20 or 30 minutes with your mind racing, get up. Staying in bed just strengthens that association between your bed and struggle. Do something genuinely calm and boring. Read a book with dim light. Sit quietly. Not as punishment for not sleeping, just as a way to occupy yourself until you actually feel sleepy.
When you do feel sleepy, go back to bed. But without any pressure about it. You’re not going to bed to make sleep happen. You’re going to bed because your body feels ready for it.
The Paradox of Trying to Stay Awake
There’s actually a technique called paradoxical intention where you try to stay awake instead of trying to fall asleep. You lie there and tell yourself, “I’m going to keep my eyes open. I’m not going to fall asleep.”
It sounds ridiculous, but it works for some people because it removes the performance pressure. You’re no longer failing at falling asleep because you’re not trying to fall asleep. And once that pressure lifts, sleep often arrives on its own.
Trusting Your Body
Your body wants to sleep. It’s designed to sleep. Even on nights when it feels impossible, your body is still trying to move toward rest.
When you stop trying to control it and just trust that your body knows what to do, sleep becomes easier. Not perfect. Not immediate. But easier.
Some nights you’ll fall asleep quickly. Other nights will be harder. That’s normal. The goal isn’t to never have a difficult night. It’s to stop making those nights worse by adding pressure and anxiety on top of natural wakefulness.
The Gentle Approach
Think of sleep like a butterfly. Chase it and it flies away. Sit still and patient, and it might just land on you.
Create good conditions and follow gentle bedtime routines to help your body wind down. Make your bedroom comfortable, then let go of whether sleep arrives exactly when you want it to.
Trust the process. Trust your body. And most importantly, take the pressure off yourself to perform sleep perfectly.
Because the less you try, the more naturally sleep will come.
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