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Sleep is one of those things that can seem incredibly simple until it stops being simple. We are often told that adults need a certain number of hours, should go to bed at a sensible time, avoid screens, develop a good bedtime routine and somehow sleep peacefully until morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
For some people, that works reasonably well. For others, sleep has never looked quite like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our sleep can be affected by stress, physical and mental health, medication, hormones, pain, sensory needs, caring responsibilities, shift work, our environment and simply the individual rhythm of our bodies. Sometimes understanding what is happening with sleep can be more helpful than immediately trying to make it conform to what we think it should<\/em> look like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our bodies have an internal system that helps regulate periods of sleepiness and alertness, often referred to as our circadian rhythm or body clock. Light and darkness are important influences on this system, alongside other signals such as activity, eating and our usual routines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During sleep, we move through different stages: lighter sleep, deeper slow-wave sleep and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Rather than completing these once, we cycle through them several times during the night. Different stages are associated with processes including memory, learning, emotional processing, physical restoration and immune function.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sleep, then, isn’t simply a period when everything switches off. Our brains and bodies remain surprisingly busy while we’re apparently doing absolutely nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You will often read that adults should get around seven to nine hours of sleep each night. That’s a useful general guide, but human beings don’t all have identical sleep needs, nor do we necessarily become sleepy and wake at the same times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For some neurodivergent people, sleep has never fitted comfortably into the expected pattern. Autistic people and people with ADHD, for example, commonly report sleep differences. Settling down, switching from one activity to another, sensory comfort, racing thoughts, becoming absorbed in something or simply not feeling sleepy at the conventional time can all play a part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That doesn’t mean every difference needs to be corrected. Perhaps a more useful question is whether your sleep is working for you<\/strong>. Do you generally feel sufficiently rested? Can you function in the ways you need and want to during the day? Or are you persistently exhausted, distressed by your sleep or struggling to stay awake when you need to be alert?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes the difficulty isn’t somebody’s natural rhythm at all. It is trying to fit that rhythm into a world organised around particular school, work and social hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even the idea that a good night’s sleep should be one uninterrupted block isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems. Historical accounts describe segmented<\/em> or biphasic<\/em> sleep in some pre-industrial societies, including references to a \u201cfirst sleep\u201d and \u201csecond sleep\u201d, separated by a period of wakefulness during the night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is debate about how widespread this pattern actually was, so we shouldn’t assume that everybody once slept this way. What it does remind us, though, is that ideas about when and how we should<\/em> sleep have also been influenced by culture, artificial light, working patterns and the way our lives are organised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For some people, waking during the night isn’t particularly distressing until they notice they’re awake and begin worrying that they shouldn’t be. Suddenly the clock is being checked, the remaining hours are being calculated and the pressure to get back to sleep has begun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Different doesn’t automatically mean wrong. What matters is what the pattern means for the person living it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not getting enough sleep can affect concentration, memory, mood, energy and our ability to manage the ordinary demands of the day. When we’re exhausted, things that would usually be manageable can feel considerably harder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The relationship also works in the other direction. Anxiety can make it difficult to settle, low mood can change how much or how little we sleep, trauma can make relaxing or feeling vulnerable enough to sleep difficult, and stress can leave our minds continuing to work long after we’d quite like them to stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This can create an unpleasant circle. We don’t sleep well, so the next day becomes harder. Then we begin worrying about whether we’ll sleep that night, which isn’t particularly conducive to drifting peacefully off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes the problem isn’t that we can’t<\/em> go to sleep. We just don’t quite want to go to bed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You may hear this called bedtime procrastination<\/em>, or sometimes revenge bedtime procrastination<\/em>. After a day filled with work, caring responsibilities, noise, expectations or other people’s needs, late evening might be the first time that feels entirely your own. Nobody wants anything. Nothing else has to happen. Going to bed means giving up that little pocket of freedom, so another episode, another chapter, another game or another half-hour on your phone becomes surprisingly appealing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There can be something else happening too. Going to sleep brings tomorrow closer. If tomorrow contains work, responsibilities, something we’re dreading, or simply another exhausting day, staying awake can almost feel like holding tomorrow at a distance. We know morning will arrive anyway, but for a little longer we’re still safely in today<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather than immediately treating this as a bad habit that needs correcting, perhaps we can become curious about it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is so valuable about being awake at that time?<\/strong><\/mark><\/p>\n\n\n\n Is it quiet? Privacy? Choice? Freedom from demands? Time to think? Time not<\/em> to think? An opportunity to become absorbed in something you enjoy? Or simply a period when nobody needs anything from you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The answer might tell us that improving sleep isn’t only about changing bedtime. Perhaps something important is missing from the rest of the day too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the particularly frustrating things about sleep is that the harder we try to make it happen, the more elusive it can become. Lying in bed thinking \u201cI have to sleep now\u201d<\/em> can turn sleep into another task we’re failing to complete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So rather than creating lots of rigid rules, it may be more useful to experiment with the conditions that help your<\/strong> system recognise that it can begin to settle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some people like darkness and complete silence; others sleep better with background noise. Some find reading relaxing; others need movement before settling. A warm bath or shower helps some people, while familiar music, an audiobook, a repetitive activity or a programme they’ve watched many times might work better for somebody else. Some people need quite a long transition between being busy and being ready for sleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Regular routines, daylight and movement during the day, reducing caffeine later in the day and having some kind of winding-down period can be helpful. Alcohol may make us initially feel sleepy but can disrupt sleep later in the night. Screens can keep some people awake too, particularly when what they’re watching or doing is stimulating, but there’s little benefit in turning avoiding a screen into another bedtime battle if a familiar podcast or programme actually helps you settle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is where trial and error matters. The aim isn’t to become good at sleep hygiene. It’s to discover what helps you rest.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n If you wake during the night, you don’t necessarily need to do anything about it. Sometimes accepting \u201cI’m awake at the moment\u201d<\/em> creates much less activation than repeatedly checking the time and calculating how much sleep is left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’ve been awake for a while and find yourself becoming increasingly frustrated, anxious or alert, it can sometimes help to change something. You might get comfortable somewhere else for a while, read, listen to something familiar, write down whatever is going around your head, or do something quiet until you begin to feel sleepy again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And even when sleep doesn’t come immediately, rest still has value<\/strong>. One difficult night’s sleep doesn’t automatically mean tomorrow is ruined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a difference between having a sleep pattern that is unusual and having one that is making life difficult. If you’re regularly exhausted despite having enough opportunity to sleep, struggling significantly during the day, or your sleep has changed considerably without an obvious reason, it may be worth talking to your GP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s also worth seeking advice if you regularly wake gasping or choking, have very loud snoring alongside daytime sleepiness, experience uncomfortable sensations or movements in your legs that interfere with sleep, or think medication or a physical health condition may be affecting your sleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A simple sleep diary can sometimes help you notice patterns. Rather than only recording the number of hours you slept, you could also notice when you naturally became sleepy, when you woke, how rested you felt, what was happening in your life and what seemed to make sleep easier or harder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most importantly, perhaps sleep doesn’t need to become another area of life in which we judge ourselves against what everybody else appears to be doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are good reasons to take persistent sleep difficulties seriously, but there is also room for individual difference. Our bodies aren’t clocks, despite how often we describe them that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So perhaps instead of beginning with \u201cHow do I make myself sleep properly?\u201d<\/strong>, we could begin somewhere gentler:<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does my sleep look like, how is it affecting me, and what might my body be telling me it needs?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Cover image courtesy of Hernan Sanchez.<\/mark><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sleep is one of those things that can seem incredibly simple until it stops being simple. We are often told that adults need a certain number of hours, should go to bed at a sensible time, avoid screens, develop a good bedtime routine and somehow sleep peacefully until morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=223"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":247,"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223\/revisions\/247"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.centredcounselling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What Happens When We Sleep?<\/mark><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
There Isn’t One Right Way to Sleep<\/strong><\/mark><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Sleep Hasn’t Always Looked the Same<\/strong><\/mark><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
When Sleep Becomes Difficult<\/mark><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
When You Don’t Want the Day to End<\/mark><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Taking Some of the Pressure Off Sleep<\/mark><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What If You’re Awake in the Night?<\/strong><\/mark><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
When It Might Be Worth Asking for Help<\/mark><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n