Can’t Sleep? Here Are Some Surprising Strategies That Work

How are you sleeping?

After one year of a pandemic—and a lot of disturbed slumber—it’s clear that our usual sleep strategies aren’t working. Scientists say many of the things we do to chase sleep are actually hurting us, and recommend a counterintuitive approach instead: Stay in bed for less time, not more.

I’ve been battling insomnia lately. I know I’m not alone. Approximately 40% of the population has had sleep problems during the pandemic, according to a meta-analysis of 44 studies from 13 countries published online in February in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

The pandemic has been a significant source of stress and worry. Our daily routines have been disrupted, affecting our circadian rhythms. And social isolation has led to mental-health problems such as depression and anxiety.

“Our brains have to feel like the world is safe and secure to be able to fall asleep,” says Wendy Troxel, a clinical psychologist, certified behavioural sleep medicine specialist and senior behavioral and social scientist at Rand Corp. “Sleep is a vulnerable state.”

We all know we’re supposed to have good sleep hygiene—keep a consistent schedule; use the bed for sleep and sex only; avoid alcohol, caffeine and bright lights before bed and practice other healthy sleep habits. This is important. But the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recently declared it’s not enough to solve chronic insomnia. In an article published online in February in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, it recommended a series of treatments collectively known as cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, or CBT-I.

Unlike run-of-the-mill sleeping problems, insomnia is a clinical disorder. We have insomnia when we have difficulty falling or staying in sleep three or more times a week, and this lasts a month or longer, leading to daytime consequences, such as fatigue, mood changes or difficulty concentrating. Sleep experts believe insomnia is triggered in part by the fear and anxiety we have about not sleeping.

The brains of people with insomnia act differently than the brains of people who are sleeping well, according to Daniel J. Buysse, a professor of psychiatry and sleep medicine specialist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dr Buysse has conducted PET scans of people who sleep normally and people with insomnia. In people with insomnia, parts of the brain involved with self-reflection and monitoring the environment show higher levels of activity during sleep compared with normal sleepers.

Ironically, insomnia is also driven by the things we do to try to solve it, experts say. We start to chase sleep—waking up later, taking naps, going to bed too early. This diminishes our sleep drive, which is our body’s need for sleep. It makes it harder to sleep when we’re supposed to. And it creates a vicious cycle: More time in bed means more opportunity for frustration and failure. Before long, we’ve taught our brain to associate our bed with the negative emotions we feel lying there.

“It’s Pavlovian,” says Philip Cheng, a clinical psychologist and sleep researcher at the Henry Ford Sleep Disorders and Research Center. “If you spend a lot of time in bed worried and frustrated and miserable, in time your brain learns that your bed is a place to do all of these things but sleep.”

CBT-I focuses on breaking this loop by helping us change the thoughts and behaviours that are counterproductive. Research shows it may have lasting effects—not just fixing our sleep problems in the present but helping us form a sort of sleep resilience. A study conducted by Dr Cheng and colleagues and published online in November in the journal Sleep found that people who received CBT-I years ago have been sleeping better and have better mental health during the pandemic than those who did not.

The treatment is typically six to eight sessions with a therapist, but there is an abbreviated version, as well as online programs to try at home. The primary component is “sleep restriction,” also called sleep retraining, which is limiting the amount of time we spend in bed awake. To track this, we calculate our “sleep efficiency number,” which is the percentage of time we’re in bed that we’re asleep. The goal is at least 85%.

To help boost our sleep efficiency, we should avoid going to bed unless we’re sleepy. (I’ve learned the hard way that being bone-weary exhausted is not the same thing as sleepy.) And we shouldn’t stay in bed unless we’re asleep. If we’re having trouble falling asleep, we should go to another room, keep the lights low and do something pleasant but not too absorbing. Read a book. (No screens!) Do a crossword. Listen to some soothing music.

We need to wake up at the same time every day. (Yes, weekends too.) This helps regulate our circadian rhythm and keeps us from sleeping late, which would harm our ability to sleep the following night. To figure out when to go to bed, calculate the amount of time you are actually asleep during the night. Then subtract that from the time you need to wake up. That’s your bedtime, for now. (Don’t give yourself less than 6 hours in bed.) As your sleep gets back on track, start lengthening your time in bed slowly, by 15 minute intervals, to try to increase your sleep duration.

Finally, we need to challenge our thinking about our sleep. When we tell ourselves we “can’t sleep” or “won’t be able to function” the next day, we’re causing ourselves a lot of anxiety, which further interferes with our sleep.

After weeks of having trouble sleeping, I signed up for an online version of CBT-I and started tracking my sleep. I’ve set (and kept!) a consistent wake-up time and have become more careful about sticking to a steady daytime routine. I started going to bed later—I’m a natural night owl but had been trying to force myself to go to bed earlier, thinking I could catch up on sleep. And once I’m in bed, if I can’t sleep, I get back up and read until I feel my eyes starting to shut.

I’ve also tried to stop stressing myself out with thoughts such as: “I’ll never sleep tonight.”

It’s all helped a lot. But I still need practice. So when I got into bed one recent night, I opened my sleep app and clicked on a link that said “Help me get to sleep now.” A recording of a man’s voice told me to find a mark on the ceiling to focus on. “Your goal is to stay awake. Don’t let your eyes close,” he said. He was deploying a technique therapists call paradoxical intention—in an attempt to distract me from focusing on trying to fall asleep. “Stay focused on that spot,” he continued.

Then he told me to notice how my eyelids were getting heavier. He acknowledged that it would probably feel like a relief to close them.

“Resist! Resist! Resist the temptation to close your eyes, even as they feel heavier and heavier!” he said. “Remember your goal here is to remain awake.”

I don’t know what he said next. I was asleep.

Tips to Help You Sleep

Practice good sleep hygiene. Aim for seven to nine hours of sleep. Keep consistent wake-up and bedtimes. Keep the bedroom cool, quiet and dark. Use the bed for sleep and sex only. Avoid alcohol, caffeine and exercise before bed. Turn off your screens 30 to 60 minutes before trying to go to sleep.

Don’t chase sleep. Don’t go to bed early. Don’t sleep late. Don’t nap. You’ll diminish your sleep drive, making it even harder to go to sleep the next night.

Don’t go to bed until you’re sleepy. Learn the difference between tiredness and sleepiness. (Sleepiness is when your eyes are drooping.) And limit your time in bed to the amount of time you are asleep, plus half an hour.

Don’t stay in bed unless you’re asleep. Tossing and turning in bed reinforces your brain’s association between wakefulness (and negative emotions) and the bed.

Re-establish daily routines. Have a morning routine. Eat meals at the same time. Exercise at the same time (not too late). Log off work at the end of the day and take a walk.

Stick to your natural circadian rhythm. You’re not going to be able to easily change whether you’re a night owl or an early bird. Recognize when you sleep best and stick with it.

Have a bedtime routine. Just like a child. Establish a daily wind-down time. Then take a bath. Read a book. Relax.

Stop catastrophizing. Quit telling yourself you won’t be able to sleep, or to function the next day. Ask yourself if these thoughts are really true. Replace them with positive thoughts. (“A bad night of sleep is not the end of the world.”) Then try to focus on something else. “People who sleep well don’t think about sleep all the time,” says Wendy Troxel, a certified behavioural sleep medicine specialist.

Keep a worry journal. “Sometimes we worry because our brain is telling us to not forget something,” says Philip Cheng, a sleep researcher at the Henry Ford Sleep Disorders and Research Center. If you write your worries down during the day, “when worry comes at night you can tell yourself you’ve already documented it.”

Practice gratitude. If you find yourself starting to ruminate in bed, think about the things you are grateful for, or savour your favourite moments from the day. This will train your brain to associate the bed with pleasant thoughts. “And it gets us back to feeling safe,” says Allison Harvey, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Golden Bear Sleep and Mood Research Clinic.

Listen to someone else’s voice. A pleasant but unexciting audiobook is ideal. Turn it on low volume when you go to bed. This will distract you from your thoughts.

Try CBT-I. The website of the Society of Behavioral Sleep Medicine allows you to search for a therapist in your area. Some health programs, such as the Cleveland Clinic and the Department of Veterans Affairs, have programs. And app versions such as Sleepio and Somryst were developed by researchers.

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.

Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.

By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.

In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.

Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.

Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”

Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”

Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.

AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.

Can’t Sleep? Here Are Some Surprising Strategies That Work

The pandemic has given us a year of lousy sleep and insomnia. Here’s what to do.

Tips to Help You Sleep

AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.