Most people know the feeling of lying awake, counting down the hours until the alarm rings, while wishing the body would just “cooperate”.
When nights like these pile up, it’s natural to search for advice — and the internet has no shortage of it. But some of the seemingly harmless tips you try to follow with the best intentions may be the very thing keeping you awake.
When good advice becomes unhelpful
According to sleep researcher Kirsty Vant from Royal Holloway, University of London, the issue isn’t that sleep habits don’t matter.
It’s that people struggling with persistent insomnia respond differently to routines than those who sleep well. For them, the pressure to “do everything right” can turn into a source of stress.
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Here are five popular sleep recommendations that can unintentionally worsen sleeplessness:
• Spending extra time in bed can weaken the brain’s link between bed and sleep, creating more frustration than rest
• Strict screen bans may leave you alone with racing thoughts, making it even harder to wind down
• Cutting out all caffeine ignores individual differences in sensitivity and metabolism
• Over-optimizing sleep with gadgets or trackers can trigger unhealthy perfectionism
• Expecting the same number of hours every night creates pressure that clashes with real-life rhythms
Why flexibility matters
Sleep isn’t a machine you can program. It shifts with stress, health, hormones, parenting, and season.
Vant’s research highlights that trying to force “perfect sleep hygiene” often backfires because it increases monitoring and worry — two of the strongest enemies of natural tiredness.
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What actually helps
Experts point toward CBT-I, a structured therapy that retrains the brain’s sleep patterns, and newer medications that target the orexin system, which regulates wakefulness.
These approaches work because they remove pressure, instead of adding more.
If you’re struggling, the takeaway is simple: it’s not your fault, and forcing sleep rarely works.
Sometimes, the most powerful step is letting go of the rules that never helped you in the first place.
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The article is based on information from Videnskab and The Conversation
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