What can I do when I dread going to bed?

It often begins earlier than you'd expect, as a thought about tonight somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, and by evening it follows you from room to room. You may catch yourself finding one more thing to do so you don't have to go up, or going up at nine to give sleep every chance, and then lying there checking whether it's coming. At this hour, the waiting can be harder than the night itself. And if the night has already come and you're reading this awake in the dark, the plan for being awake in What can I do with this evening? is there for this hour too.

A few bad nights do more than tire you: by the next evening, part of you is already expecting another one. The explanation sleep researchers use most begins with worry about sleep and about how tomorrow will go⁵5 Harvey, 2002. That worry raises the body's alertness and turns your attention to watching for signs that sleep isn't coming. It also makes the night and the day ahead look worse than they are. In bed it can run as a string of questions: am I drowsy yet, is that sleep coming, what time is it now. In small studies, people who struggled to fall asleep spent that time thinking about not sleeping⁶6 Harvey, 2000, and the more those thoughts ran⁷7 Wicklow & Espie, 2000, the longer sleep tended to take. So the hour before bed turns into the run-up to an exam, and the alertness an exam brings is exactly what keeps sleep at a distance.

Then you try harder, because effort is what usually works when something matters. It might be the herbal tea drunk as a duty, the app, the routine that has to go exactly right, or one more look at the time. Researchers call all of this sleep effort⁸8 Marques et al., 2024, and people with insomnia score higher on it⁹9 Broomfield & Espie, 2005 than good sleepers. Sleep arrives on its own and can't be steered directly, and researchers think trying to steer it helps keep poor sleep going⁸.

Is trying always the problem, though? One small experiment with normal sleepers suggests it isn't. The researchers asked some people to fall asleep as fast as they could and others to drop off whenever they liked. While calm music played, the ones trying hard fell asleep sooner¹⁰10 Ansfield et al., 1996. When brisk marches kept their minds busy, trying made sleep slower¹⁰. What we'd take from it is that effort does its harm when the mind is already busy, and at ten o'clock, worry is the marching music. If that's right, easing how much tonight matters may do more for you than finding a better technique. Watching the clock works the same way: in other small experiments it added worry and lengthened the wait³3 Tang et al., 2007.

After a few nights spent lying awake, the bed and the bedroom can themselves become cues for wakefulness and frustration⁴4 Cuddihy et al., 2025. That's one reason you can be nodding on the sofa and wide awake the moment your head meets the pillow. It feels absurd and unfair, and it's a learned link, the kind that stimulus controlstimulus control A part of insomnia treatment that helps the bed feel linked with sleep again: going to bed when sleepy, and getting up for a while when sleep won’t come. is designed to undo¹¹11 Edinger et al., 2021. Researchers who ran a trial in early insomnia describe a link only a few nights old as still in its infancy, and so easier to loosen¹²12 Ellis et al., 2015. A few hard nights haven't made anything permanent.

At ten o'clock it can feel as though everything depends on the next few hours. The research gives tonight a much smaller part. In a year-long US study, researchers followed people who'd been sleeping well, and more than a quarter had a spell of poor sleep¹1 Perlis et al., 2020 lasting weeks at some point that year. A survey of UK adults¹³13 Ellis et al., 2012 found a similar share. Of those whose good sleep turned into a run of bad nights, much as yours may have, nearly three in four were sleeping well again¹, usually within days to weeks. About one in five carried on with poorer sleep for longer.

A short night also works in your favor in one way. In a diary study, good sleepers in a bad patch usually had a good night after about one poor one, while people with insomnia did after about three²2 Perlis et al., 2014. The researchers put this down to sleep pressuresleep pressure The body’s need for sleep, which builds the longer we stay awake and eases while we sleep. building across the short nights. That pull is likeliest to help when you're a few nights into a bad patch. It's less dependable once poor sleep has gone on for months. Some people's sleep is also more easily stirred by stress¹⁴14 Kalmbach et al., 2018 than others', even though on an ordinary night they sleep like anyone else. In them, alertness can override the pull toward sleep¹⁴ even after a disturbed night.

The day after is shaped partly by what you believe about the night. In one experiment, people with insomnia were given made-up feedback from a wrist device about the night before. Those told they had slept badly felt less alert and more tired by evening¹⁵15 Gavriloff et al., 2018 than those told they had slept well, though their reaction times were no different. The experiment suggests that believing you slept badly, here because a device said so, can add to how tired the next day feels.

What sleep clinicians suggest instead is to lie down only once you're sleepy⁴¹¹4 Cuddihy et al., 202511 Edinger et al., 2021, the first step of stimulus control. Sleepy here means heavy eyes, or your head beginning to nod over a page, the kind of thing you notice without having to look for it. That makes bedtime the moment sleepiness arrives, where before it was a fixed hour to report for. If no heavy-eyed moment comes, you could simply go up at your usual time.

If you've already worked through the usual list, with no screens, the warm drink, the herbal tea and the app, it may have started to feel like a set of rules. A list of rules can't make a night go well by itself, and followed too strictly it turns into more of the effort that keeps sleep away. The tips you like can stay, as long as you don't need them to work.

In its place, you could spend the last hour on something you'd enjoy anyway: a book, a film, a puzzle, a long talk on the phone. Nobody has studied an unhurried hour as such, and it isn't a treatment. What it does is give the evening back to you, and leave sleepiness to come when it comes. The phone stays face down through all of it.

It can help, too, to have a plan for being awake, so that being awake stops feeling like an emergency. Clinicians suggest a short list of things you find pleasant and absorbing, a podcast you like or a chapter of something good, because picking something boring on purpose is another way of trying to sleep⁴4 Cuddihy et al., 2025. The idea is to wait for sleep and let it find you. Whether to get up at all is a question with its own page, and either way the list is there for whichever hour you need it.

Some people find it helps to give up the aim of sleeping altogether, even to lie there deciding to stay awake a while and see what happens. It's a recognized technique called paradoxical intention. A review of ten trials in people with insomnia found it eased insomnia and the anxiety of performing at sleep¹⁷17 Jansson-Fröjmark et al., 2022. Those trials were weak, though, and the US guideline found too little evidence¹¹11 Edinger et al., 2021 to recommend it on its own. If it starts to feel like one more task, you can stop. Tonight doesn't have to go well.

So if you're still on the sofa as you read this, there's no hurry to go up. The cup can go cold and the phone can lie face down. When your eyes grow heavy, the stairs will still be there.