10. Stop Turning the Bed Into a Place to Wrestle With Sleep
Lying awake can quickly become a project: calculate the hours left, check the clock again, and try harder to fall asleep. Unfortunately, effort and frustration are not very relaxing. When you are clearly awake and getting wound up, a brief change of scene can be more useful than another round of clock-watching.
If you have been awake for roughly twenty minutes, get up and do something quiet in a comfortable place with dim light. Read a few pages or listen to something calm, then return to bed when you feel sleepy. Treat the timing as an estimate; you do not need to monitor the clock to follow it.
Keeping work and scrolling out of bed can also help preserve its association with sleep. This idea is related to stimulus control, one element of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. It is not the whole treatment. If sleeplessness keeps returning, ask about CBT-I rather than assuming you simply need more willpower.
