why can’t I sleep at night even when I’m tired
I'm so tired, why can't I sleep?
The real reason why you don’t sleep well at night, and what you can do about it.
Why you can't sleep when you're busy or stressed, and what you can do about it
It doesn’t make sense… You’re knackered.
It’s been a tough day. Perhaps you’ve had more than a tough day. Perhaps you’ve had a tough week, or a tough month or year.
Having stumbled, bleary-eyed, through the entire day, you’ve survived entirely on coffee, and the promise of a comfortable bed to flop into at the end of it. You’ve been ratty, impatient, and barely able to focus. You only realised that you were absentmindedly trying to stack the kettle in the dishwasher when you couldn’t close it properly.
And now, here you are. In your comfy PJs and tucked into your bed at last. You might have drifted off to sleep instantly at 9pm the moment your head hit the pillow. But now it’s 1am and you find yourself lying in your lovely bed, bloodshot eyes staring unseeingly at the ceiling in the dark.
WIDE AWAKE
You still feel tired to the bone, you ache to drift off back into that lovely soporific state, but here you are. It’s like someone has flicked a switch, and the ability to sleep has simply evaporated. You’re awake, and tired, and totally, utterly, p*ssed off about it. And you won’t be getting back to sleep in a hurry.
But why?!?
What are our bodies are actually doing when we sleep?
Although it seems like such a contradictory bodily response, night waking and waking very early are very common for a very good reason.
You see, during our sleep our brains and our bodies perform two very important functions. Both of these functions are essential for our physical and mental well-being. But we are subject to an incredibly frustrating design floor which means that these two functions can compromise one another.
We all know about one of these functions. We know that sleep enables our bodies to rest, and our cells to recuperate, regroup and rebuild where necessary. That’s why it’s such a good idea to rest up when we’re convalescing, so that our bodies can direct all our energies into getting better.
But there’s another function that is not so well known or so widely understood, at it’s all about why we dream.
Neuroscientific studies have shown that when we enter the REM phases of our sleep cycle, and we start to dream, our brains are actually hard at work.
For many years, we weren’t exactly sure why, but recent studies have revealed that the purpose of dreaming is for the brain to sift through the events of the day, retained in our brains as emotional memories. At night, we process these memories and store them in an area of the brain called the hippocampus, for later.
The hippocampus can be described as the brain’s filing cabinet. What’s happening when we dream is that our brains are processing our memories. We’re consolidating them into narrative templates of thought patterns and behavioural patterns, which are then filed away for future use.
The sleep design flaw
So what have these functions got to do with you waking up wide awake when you should be sleeping? Well, as I said, it’s a bit of a biological design flaw.
Sleep is a restorative process, both for mind and body, and our physiology is designed to balance out these two needs. Our bodies need to rest and recuperate, and our brains need to process and consolidate our memories.
When we sleep well, we’re achieving both these tasks. And when we wake up in the morning we feel physically refreshed. The contents of our brains have been organised in such a way that we can think clearly and go about our day in an efficient manner.
The flaw is all to do with the dreaming bit. Surprisingly, the act of dreaming is an enervating process.
It takes up huge amounts of energy. In fact, we burn THREE TIMES more energy when we dream, than we do when we are awake and restful.
Bonkers, eh?
Now, because this process of memory consolidation takes up so much energy, our bodies have a natural limit on how much we can dream during our sleep cycles.
REM sleep is limited to around 20% of our sleep. The remaining 80% needs to be restorative sleep for our bodies to do their R&R thing. If we get to the 20% mark, and we’re still dreaming, our bodies wake us up.
And you’ll know when this is what’s waking you, because it feels different from, say, being woken up by one of your children calling out for you, or a car alarm going off in the street outside.
It feels like someone has flicked a switch and you’re wide awake, alert, and snapped right out of ‘sleep’ mode.
Stress, and your 'primitive' mind
Why is it that sometimes we’re still processing memories when we’ve reached our 20% limit? Well, it all comes down to stress.
You might have noticed that when I explained about memory consolidation, I referred to ’emotional memories’, and you might ask what that means. Emotional memories are formed when we are reacting to high-stress situations.
When we are stressed out, we operate from a specific part of our brain. Separate from the intellectual centres, it’s the original, primitive part of our brains that we default to under stress.
This part of the brain is the similar in humans as it is in all other animals – we have all evolved with it. This part of the brain is all about survival mode. It’s about self preservation – keeping you safe and ready to defend yourself against potential threats.
It’s a pretty primitive bit of kit compared to the intellectual centres of the brain, and it’s functions are somewhat limited
When you’re using this part of your brain you can only see things from the worst possible perspective – and you can only act within the emotional parameters of anger, anxiety, and depression.
The frustrating thing about it is that when you’re operating from this part of the brain, the way in which it responds creates yet more stress, keeping you in survival mode for longer, and it can become a bit of a vicious circle.
When you’ve been stuck in primitive mode all day, your experiences, and the memories you form from them, are formed by your primitive mind, so they will be highly emotive.
Your brain will be accumulating stacks of these emotional memories, which it needs to process during sleep. This is when you’re likely to be woken up in the middle of the night – you’ve got far too much stuff to process to squeeze into that 20%.
And whilst your brain will want to get it all straight so that you wake up calm and focused, your body also needs to rest and won’t allow you to break through that limit. Which is why you can’t sleep when you’re busy or stressed.
Serotonin - your secret weapon
The good news is that to get back to sleeping soundly there are some fairly simple steps you can take to help yourself. It’s all about keeping you using the intellectual part of your brain, and keeping your primitive ‘survival mode’ brain nice and quiet.
It’s a key element of the therapy that I provide in my sessions. I help my clients retrain their brains, harnessing the power of neuroplasticity to create healthy, lasting, patterns in the brain to encourage this self-helping behaviour. And there are some things that you can do to work towards it by yourself.
When we operate from out intellectual brain centres, we are able to think clearly, process what’s going on around us easily, and make sensible decisions and choices.
Generally it’s a pretty positive state of mind. On a chemical level, when we’re successfully using this part of our brains, our brains are producing a consistent, steady flow of serotonin – the happiness hormone… Which is why, when we’re calm, we generally feel pretty good, and on top of things.
You can ensure that you stay in this sensible, calm, positive part of the brain by helping yourself continue to keep producing serotonin.
Three Simple Things
So how do we get our serotonin flowing? What are these magical behaviours that create this natural flow of chemical happiness? Well, actually it’s pretty easy to cheat the system!
Scientists believe that the purpose of serotonin was originally to trigger certain behaviours to perpetuate the survival of our primitive species.
We know what these behaviours are, and so we can mimic these behaviours to elicit serotonin at will! There are three key things to pay attention to…
1.) Positive Activity
In primitive times, the survival of our tribes would have depended on our ability to get hold of enough food for us to survive on, so when early man went out to hunt or forage, they’d have felt a surge of serotonin.
Obviously these days we don’t need to hunt to eat, but we know that exercise, in any form, still floods our systems with feelgood chemicals including serotonin and dopamine.
2.)Positive Interactions
The human race depends on us interacting, forming bonds to keep us safe, and reproduce! This is why it feels really good when we spend quality time with friends, family, or a significant other.
If you can find a few minutes each day to enjoy an interaction with someone you enjoy being with, you’re stimulating serotonin, which lasts in your system for hours, long after you’ve finished hanging out, or put the phone down.
3.) Positive Thinking
This one might feel tricky, especially when you’re stressed out, anxious, down, or just plain overwhelmed. The good news is that you can do it, even if you don’t feel particularly positive when you start. The trick is to focus on small things.
When I work with my clients, one of the first exercises I ask them to do, is to start to keep a diary of what’s been good. I ask them, to just spend a couple of minutes each day thinking of three things that have been positive about their day (big or small), and write them down. It might sound simple, and perhaps a bit silly, but there is a scientific purpose for this – by forcing your brain to recall positive things about your day, you’re doing two things.
You’re stimulating the flow or serotonin, and you’re forging new neural pathways in your brain, which become stronger and stronger the more you do it, making it easier to think positively, and ultimately making you feel happier!
Hack your serotonin levels, hack your sleep
One of the first significant changes that occur with my clients is that they start to sleep much better. Often, by the time we’re 2 or 3 sessions in, they are sleeping through more. They’re waking up in the morning at a more reasonable time, and feeling well rested and clear headed on waking. There is a direct correlation between my clients taking up these three simple tactics, and the quality sleep they’re getting.
Let’s break it down. If, everyday, you aim to take some form of exercise (doesn’t matter whether it’s a 10k run or a walk around the block, it’s just about getting your body moving), this will improve your sleep. Add in a few minutes of consciously feelgood interaction, appreciating spending a bit of time with someone else in whatever form, this will improve your sleep. And spending just a few minutes, maybe before you hit the sack, just thinking over your day to recall three positive things about it, this will improve your sleep.
I know it sounds stupidly simple, but it works. Time and time again. And you’ll feel better in yourself too. Give it a whirl, it won’t take long to notice the difference.
One last thing...
Perhaps you stumbled upon this post to figure out why you can’t sleep when you’re busy or stressed. And perhaps whilst reading this, you’ve realised that you don’t sleep very well very often for this very reason.
If you’re struggling with stress, or you just need to find a way to sleep better, get in touch. I’m an experienced psychotherapist and hypnotherapist, and I help people with this sort of stuff all the time. I work online as well as in person (you can find out more about me here, and info about booking and prices here) if you’d like to work with me.
And if you’re just looking for something you can do by yourself, check out my range of hypnotherapy relaxation tracks, some of which are designed specifically for sleep. You can download them in seconds, and they are incredibly helpful for helping you de-stress and reset your brain so it’s ready for sleep.
You can also pick up more tips and info on how to successfully hack your mental health on my socials, just click the links below.
why can’t I sleep at night even when I’m tired
