It’s 11:40 p.m. You’re up at seven and presenting at nine. You turn off the light, settle in, close your eyes and tell yourself firmly: right, sleep now.
Your body lies down. Your mind clocks in for the night shift. It checks whether you’re falling asleep yet, reports that you’re not, and checks again. Twenty minutes later you’re wide awake and thinking about nothing but sleep.
Most things improve with effort. Sleep doesn’t. Sleep researcher Colin Espie called the problem sleep effort: in his model sleep is an involuntary process, and every conscious attempt to steer it switches on the alertness that keeps it away.
The Watchman
Picture a village where wolves once roamed. The villagers built a lookout post at the edge of town, and every night a watchman stood there with a lantern. Thanks to him nobody came to harm.
The wolves are long gone. Nobody told the watchman, so he’s still out there, staring into the dark and lifting the lantern at every rustle.
Night-time alertness can work much the same way. Your nervous system keeps quietly checking whether it’s safe, and falling asleep means letting go of control. If some part of you doesn’t feel safe, staying awake makes sense to it. Often the reaction was justified once, during a stretch of life when you really did have to be on guard at night, with a baby, a sick relative or a lot of uncertainty. Nobody stood the watch down afterward.
Shouting at the watchman doesn’t help. Tell him to leave this minute and he concludes something must be up. Lying in bed ordering yourself to sleep is the same move.
Telling Him to Stay Awake
A technique called paradoxical intention uses this backward logic. The term comes from the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, and it was later tried for insomnia: you lie in bed and gently try to stay awake. The pressure to sleep goes, and often the anxiety that was blocking sleep goes with it. Reviews find mostly positive but mixed results. Some people it helps, some less, and a few sleep worse. I’d try it on a night when you have nothing to lose.
Questions for a Bad Night
I’d also stop using the word “insomnia” for a while. It sounds like a diagnosis, and a diagnosis sounds like an enemy. Ask instead where you’re holding tension and what you’re trying to keep under control. Those questions have answers, and you can work on them during the day too.
On a bad night, two questions are enough: what exactly am I guarding right now, and what would let me put it down for a while? You don’t have to answer them at 3 a.m.
Giving Him the Message
What the watchman needs is to hear that the wolves are gone and that he can put the lantern down. Your head may have known for ages that the night is calm, but your body doesn’t take instructions from your head. That’s why it can help to say the message on purpose, out loud or silently, slowly: the danger has passed, this alertness isn’t needed anymore.
It won’t knock you out in a minute. In trance, though, messages like this tend to reach further than in ordinary thinking.
A trance also removes the job of falling asleep. The voice leads, the rhythm sets the pace, and you steer nothing, so your attention has somewhere to rest besides the question of whether you’re asleep yet. If you fall asleep partway, the trance has done its job.
There’s some research behind this. In a 2014 study by Cordi and colleagues, seventy young, healthy women listened before an afternoon nap either to a short recording with hypnotic suggestions for deep sleep or to a neutral text. In the women who go into hypnosis easily, deep sleep rose by roughly 80% after the suggestion; in the less responsive women, nothing changed. That’s only women, only a nap, and only some of them. A 2018 review by Chamine and colleagues went through 24 studies: roughly 58% reported better sleep after hypnosis, with minimal adverse effects, though the studies varied a lot and were often of weaker quality.
When It’s More Than a Bad Night
If you’ve slept badly for weeks or months and it’s affecting your days, see a doctor. There may be a medical cause that trance won’t fix.
For long-term insomnia, professional societies recommend cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBT-I, as the first-line treatment. It’s a structured approach delivered with a doctor or a sleep specialist. Trance can go alongside it. It doesn’t replace it.
The dull basics of sleep hygiene still apply: getting up at about the same time, a dark and quiet bedroom, caffeine in the morning rather than the evening, the phone away from your pillow. Honestly, the phone is the one I’d deal with first.
Tonight
- Go to bed to rest. Sleep is a bonus.
- Slow down for the last half hour. Dim the lights and move more slowly. A slow pace is one of the things your nervous system reads as “all clear.”
- Play a trance. Lying down is fine; so is intending not to fall asleep.
- Deliver the message. Once your breathing settles, tell yourself silently: the danger has passed. This alertness isn’t needed right now. Thank you.
- Let yourself wake up. Light sleep, brief wakings and deep sleep take turns all night, so waking at two is part of the normal pattern.
If you end up in that state at the edge, not asleep but not doing anything either, leave it alone. It’s deep rest, and it counts.