Why Lying in Bed Trying to Sleep Keeps You Awake

You're exhausted, the house is finally quiet, and the moment you lie down you start working at falling asleep. You check whether you're relaxed yet, glance at the clock, and do the math on how many hours are left. Somehow you end up more awake than when you started.

This episode explains why. Sleep isn't something you can do on purpose, and the effort to force it keeps part of your mind on duty. You'll hear what sleep researchers found about clock-watching, why a busy head and a hard push are a bad combination at bedtime, and how long it normally takes healthy adults to fall asleep.

The shift is simple: your job at bedtime isn't to fall asleep. It's to set the conditions and then get out of the way.

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7 Good Minutes is presented by OCEANSCAPE and published by The Extraordinary Network.