Do you recognise any of these?
- Your head is perfectly clear about what you ought to be doing, and you cannot make yourself start. And then you decide you have a procrastination problem and turn on yourself about that too.
- Your brain feels slower than everyone else’s. There’s a meeting, your manager is in it, the topic is one you know well and you’d planned to make an impression, and someone else gets there first. Every time.
- Decisions are hard. You can never quite think it through, and you conclude you’re timid, that you can’t bring yourself to leap. At the same time your mind runs heavy, the smallest disturbance sets off ripples, and it’s exhausting.
- Or it’s purely physical. You watch colleagues and managers stride down the corridor looking full of blood and energy, speaking with real force behind the voice, and you envy it.
There are many reasons those moments happen, and some of them aren’t fully in your control. But one reason gets badly underrated: sleep. When someone is properly rested, and has been for a sustained stretch, one large thing changes. They act more readily, they think faster, the mind opens out, and the whole person comes back to life.
So every time I take stock of my business, one item is always on the list: protect the quality of my sleep. And the reason I think that way is that I used to be a terrible sleeper. Insomnia was my problem, and every symptom I’ve just described I’ve lived through myself.
My sleep is stable now. Last night scored 92.
Here’s what I’ve tried personally and found genuinely helpful, on both the physical and the mental side.
Physical
- Eat dinner earlier, and one mouthful less. Past a certain age especially, a late or heavy dinner is more than the gut can process in time, and when bedtime comes there’s a blocked, full feeling that makes it hard to drop off, and easy to wake again. Overeating also raises body temperature and heart rate, which is not a state you rest well in.
- Try not to drink. I haven’t for years. If you must, drink at lunchtime and give your body the hours it needs to process the alcohol. There’s a common misreading here: being tipsy feels like it makes you sleep well, but that’s passing out, not resting.
- No phone after nine. If you can manage it, no phone after dinner. The trouble with what’s on the phone is that it’s fragmented, and often over-stimulating to the emotions and the senses, so it leaves you unsettled. Phones are also addictive: once it’s in your hand several hours can vanish, and you end up staying up late without ever deciding to.
- If you have the means and you remember, soak your feet to relax. A bath works too, as long as you take it early rather than getting straight out and into bed. If you’re aiming for ten o’clock, finish the bath by nine at the latest and leave your body time to cool down.
- Same bedtime and same wake time every day, weekends included. Earlier if you can. I’ve experimented on myself: for the same total hours, going to bed early yields a great deal more deep sleep than going to bed late. This is the one I’m worst at, so let me plant a flag here. Asleep before eleven.
Mental
Very often, unsettled sleep is something sitting on the mind.
- I’d strongly recommend finding a few novels you love. Read fiction instead of scrolling the phone and instead of turning things over. I’m not against thinking about your problems and building a strategy for them, but I’d argue strongly against doing it late at night, because that’s how thinking turns into rumination. What fiction does well is move the focus off yourself and onto observing and feeling for other people’s joys and sorrows.
- If your head is full of things, or full of ideas, get a pen and paper and write them down. I keep a small notebook and a pen by my bed. Sometimes I’m lying there unable to sleep and the to-dos and the ideas start arriving, and the more they arrive the more awake I get. The best thing to do is write them down. Let them stop being active in your head, and move them onto the paper.
- Then there are the feelings. Something unfair happened during the day, you had a fight with someone, someone got under your skin, and at night it grows. Whatever you do, don’t tell yourself to stop being angry because it isn’t worth it. Saying that to yourself is just adding pressure, it almost never works, and it tends to come back as blaming yourself for having such a temper. The better route is to let it out. Talk to a friend you trust, or write it down, or go and move your body. Personally I don’t like talking about it. I prefer to digest it myself.
- And the last resort: sleep headphones, an audiobook or a podcast, with a sleep timer. This is what I do when I genuinely can’t quiet my head, when there are too many thoughts, and I want my eyes closed anyway. It’s brute force, a physical refusal to let myself keep thinking.
The mental side comes down to this: stop thinking about it at night, and stop turning it over. Nothing useful gets worked out in the small hours. If the thoughts and feelings keep surfacing anyway, either move your attention or find a way to discharge them.
That’s what I’ve got, all of it tested on myself. Everyone’s constitution and situation is different, and I’d like you to keep exploring your own, and to keep getting to know yourself well enough to work with your body and your mind rather than against them. Most things and most people aren’t worth the effort of studying closely. Yourself, your own body and your own spirit are absolutely worth the time.