What to Do When You Can’t Sleep

It’s 1:47 a.m.

Eventually you check the clock.

Your alarm is set for 6:30.

And immediately the calculation begins.

If I fall asleep right now, I can still get four hours and forty-three minutes.

A little later:

Now it’s less than four and a half.

At some point, being awake stops being the only problem.

Now you’re worried about being awake.

So what should you actually do when you can’t sleep?

The answer is less about finding the perfect trick to knock yourself out and more about avoiding the things that can make wakefulness more frustrating and activating.

The immediate goal isn’t to force yourself to sleep. It’s to give sleep an opportunity to return.

First, stop doing the sleep math

The clock feels useful because it gives you information.

Unfortunately, at 2 a.m., that information often turns into arithmetic.

Then you check again.

And again.

The clock hasn’t changed your ability to sleep.

But it has given your mind something new to monitor.

This is why sleep guidance often recommends keeping the clock out of view when you’re trying to sleep.³⁴⁵

You still need an alarm.

You just don’t need a running scoreboard.

Don’t try harder to sleep

Sleep is strange in this way.

There are plenty of things in life where trying harder helps.

Sleep doesn’t work particularly well as another item on that list.

Imagine lying in bed thinking:

Okay. I need to fall asleep now.

You close your eyes.

Nothing.

Relax.

Nothing.

Stop thinking.

Now you’re thinking about not thinking.

Why am I still awake?

You’ve turned sleep into a task—and yourself into the person responsible for completing it.

That can make bedtime feel less like a place where sleep happens and more like a nightly test.

Should you get out of bed if you can’t sleep?

This is one of the most common pieces of insomnia advice:

If you can’t sleep, get out of bed.

There is a real idea behind it.

It comes from stimulus control, an established behavioral component of CBT-I.¹³

The basic principle is that the bed should become strongly associated with sleep rather than with long periods of frustrated wakefulness.

If you’re lying comfortably and feel as though sleep may return, you don’t need to leap out of bed simply because you woke up.

But if you’re clearly awake, becoming frustrated, worrying or repeatedly trying to force sleep, continuing that struggle in bed may not be useful.

Getting up for a while can interrupt that cycle.³⁴⁵

The idea is simple:

This isn’t punishment for being awake.

It’s an attempt to stop teaching your brain that bed = hours of effort, frustration and monitoring.

What about the “20-minute rule”?

You’ve probably seen advice that says:

If you haven’t fallen asleep within 20 minutes, get out of bed.

That can easily create another problem.

Now you need to know when the twenty minutes are up.

So you check the clock.

The rule designed to reduce wakefulness has turned into another reason to monitor it.

Behavioral sleep guidance has traditionally used an approximate period such as 15–20 minutes when describing stimulus control, but that timing is not meant to require clock watching.⁵

You don’t need a stopwatch.

You don’t even need to know exactly how long you’ve been awake.

What matters more is recognizing:

I’m awake, I’m getting frustrated, and lying here is becoming an effort.

That’s enough information.

What should you do when you get out of bed?

This is where internet advice sometimes becomes oddly specific.

You don’t need a magic activity.

The aim is simply to do something quiet and relatively unstimulating while you wait for sleepiness to return.

The activity shouldn’t become another project.

This probably isn’t the ideal moment to answer work emails, reorganize your finances or begin researching tomorrow’s problems.

And you don’t have to ask every thirty seconds:

Am I sleepy yet?

When you notice that sleepiness has returned, you can go back to bed.

What about your phone?

The phone is tempting for obvious reasons.

The problem isn’t that looking at a phone once somehow destroys the rest of your night.

The bigger issue is what the phone can bring with it.

Light exposure at night can also affect the circadian signals involved in sleep and wakefulness.¹²

So if you get out of bed, the goal is generally to keep the environment relatively dim and the activity calm rather than turning 2 a.m. into another period of daytime stimulation.

Relaxation can help—but it isn’t a sleeping pill

Maybe you try slow breathing.

These can be useful ways to reduce physical or mental arousal.¹³

But there’s a subtle trap.

You do the breathing exercise for three minutes.

Then check:

Did it work?

Another five minutes.

Still awake.

Now relaxation has become another test you’re failing.

The purpose of relaxation is better thought of as reducing arousal, not guaranteeing unconsciousness within a certain number of minutes.

You can be calmer and still awake.

That doesn’t mean the exercise failed.

Sleep may follow.

Or it may not.

You don’t have to grade the result.

What not to do at 2 a.m.

A difficult night can make experimentation very appealing.

You start searching:

What can I take to make myself sleep right now?

This is a poor time to improvise.

Alcohol may make some people feel sleepy initially, but it can contribute to lighter and more disrupted sleep later.¹²

Over-the-counter sleep products and supplements can have side effects, interactions and limitations of their own.

And medications shouldn’t be doubled, combined or used differently from their instructions simply because the night is going badly.

One frustrating night does not require a 2 a.m. chemistry experiment.

What about tomorrow?

After a terrible night, tomorrow can feel like damage control.

I’ll sleep until noon.

I’ll go to bed at 7 tomorrow night.

I’ll take a huge nap.

I need to catch up somehow.

The urge makes sense.

But repeatedly moving sleep and wake times around in response to individual bad nights can make the overall pattern harder to understand.

A consistent wake schedule is one of the principles used in behavioral treatment for insomnia.¹²

That doesn’t mean you should use this article to calculate a personalized sleep schedule.

It means one difficult night doesn’t necessarily require redesigning your entire routine the next morning.

And there’s one important exception to the “push through tomorrow” mentality:

Safety comes first.

If you are dangerously sleepy, don’t drive or perform other safety-sensitive activities simply to preserve a routine.

One bad night is not the same as chronic insomnia

Nearly everyone has nights when sleep doesn’t cooperate.

Sometimes there isn’t an obvious explanation at all.

An occasional bad night is different from a persistent pattern of difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep or returning to sleep despite having adequate opportunity for sleep.³

That’s when the question changes from:

“What should I do tonight?”

to:

“Why does this keep happening?”

And that second question is usually more useful.

Look at the pattern, not just tonight

If this happens repeatedly, try recording your sleep for a week.

Not minute by minute.

And definitely not by repeatedly checking the clock overnight.

Approximate:

Then look at the pattern.

Those are more useful questions than trying to diagnose the night at 2 a.m.

Try the 7-Day Sleep Record

A sleep record won’t make tonight disappear.

But it can make repeated nights easier to understand.

Instead of relying on the memory:

“I barely slept all week.”

you can look at what actually happened across seven nights.

Measure before you change anything

Record the pattern first. You don’t need to repeatedly check the clock overnight to make the record exact—estimates are enough.

If this keeps happening, CBT-I is different from collecting more sleep tips

When someone has persistent insomnia, the answer usually isn’t an ever-growing collection of bedtime tricks.

CBT-I—cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia—is recommended as a first-line treatment for chronic insomnia.¹³⁶

It can include several components, such as stimulus control, approaches to sleep scheduling, cognitive strategies and relaxation.¹³

Importantly, these pieces work together as part of a broader treatment approach.

That’s different from taking one technique—such as getting out of bed when awake—and turning it into a rigid rule that must work immediately.

The goal isn’t to become better at performing sleep rituals.

It’s to change the patterns that may be helping insomnia continue.

When should you talk to a doctor?

Consider talking with a healthcare professional if difficulty sleeping persists, regularly affects your daytime functioning, or leaves you struggling with significant sleepiness.

It’s particularly worth mentioning symptoms such as:

When to talk to a doctor

Symptoms worth mentioning to a healthcare professional

• Loud snoring, gasping or observed pauses in breathing
• Significant daytime sleepiness
• Difficulty staying awake while driving or during other safety-sensitive activities
• Uncomfortable sensations or an urge to move your legs at night
• Persistent pain or other physical symptoms disturbing sleep
• Major changes in mood or mental health
• A medication change that coincided with the sleep problem

Those details may suggest that something besides—or alongside—insomnia is affecting your sleep.

You don’t have to solve the night

At 1:47 a.m., tomorrow can feel very close.

You know exactly how much you want to sleep.

And exactly how little control you seem to have over making it happen.

That’s frustrating.

But you don’t need to spend the rest of the night solving sleep.

Because sometimes the most useful thing you can do when you can’t sleep is stop treating sleep like something you have to accomplish.