If You Cannot Sleep, Get Up

There is a counterintuitive technique in clinical sleep medicine called stimulus control, and it has decades of evidence behind it. The idea is that your brain learns associations, and if you spend hours awake and frustrated in bed, your brain learns that the bed is a place where you lie awake. The next night becomes harder, and the night after that harder still.

The rule is simple. If you have been awake in bed for more than twenty minutes, get up. Move to another room. Sit in dim light. Read something gentle, do a quiet activity, avoid screens entirely. When sleepiness returns, return to bed.

The first time you do this, it feels backward. The bed seems like the obvious place to keep trying. Within a few weeks of consistent practice, the bed becomes associated with sleep again, and falling asleep becomes faster than it has been in years. The discipline of leaving the bed is what eventually lets you stay in it.