Dr. Jade Wu helps you meet snooze challenges with evidence-based research, a sympathetic ear, and zero judgment.
Former Savvy Psychologist host Dr. Jade Wu is bringing us a special mini-series based on her new book, Hello Sleep: the Science and Art of Overcoming Insomnia Without Medications. In part three, we hear why "sleep hygiene" may not be all it's cracked up to be.
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Welcome back to Savvy Psychologist. I’m your guest host, Dr. Jade Wu…and for long-time listeners, I’m also a blast from the past as a former host of the show, here to give you a miniseries on my favorite topic–sleep. This is the third and final part of my mini-series based on my new book, Hello Sleep: the Science and Art of Overcoming Insomnia Without Medications. In this mini-series, I’ll help you meet SLEEP challenges with evidence-based research, a sympathetic ear, and zero judgment. Today, let’s unpack sleep hygiene—what matters, what doesn’t, and how to let go of unnecessary effort to achieve sustainable sleep health.
A while ago, I had an insomnia patient with perfect sleep hygiene. Michelle never had more than one cup of coffee (always before noon), she went to the gym often but never close to bedtime, she had blackout curtains and a high-tech sound machine, she went to bed at 10:00 PM on the dot and meditated with the goal of falling asleep at 10:30 PM… she even put away all screens by 8:00 PM every night. That’s right—even her Kindle!
So you can understand why Michelle was extra frustrated—she was doing everything right, and she tried so hard to just clear her mind and relax. Yet, she still took forever to fall asleep. So when I met her, she was desperate… she asked, “What am I doing wrong?” (with choice placement of a word that rhymes with “duck,” because she was on her third day of having hardly slept at all).
You may be surprised to hear this, but in my insomnia clinic, I see people with impeccable sleep hygiene all the time. If this resonates with you, I have two words for you: Sleep Effort.
Sleep Effort is anything you do to try to chase down sleep, to try to force sleep to happen when it’s not naturally happening on its own. It might be counting sheep while saying to yourself, “Come on, just sleep, dammit!” It might be trying really hard to clear your mind and getting frustrated when stray thoughts keep coming back. It might even be cultivating impeccable sleep hygiene, with the expectation that the harder you work to perfect your sleep environment and habits, the easier it should be to sleep.
But sleep does not reward hard work and meticulous preparation.
Here’s what I mean: Imagine your friend invites you to come to her co-worker’s birthday party. She insists that it’s “chill,” that it’s just a casual get-together with some drinks and snacks. Yet, you see her putting on a Kevlar vest, testing the night-vision goggles she’s going to wear, and packing a can of bear spray and a blueprint of her co-worker’s apartment building into her purse while muttering, “just in case…”
Would you feel relaxed tagging along? Or would you be nervous?
Well, if Sleep were your friend, this is what you’d be doing to her. You’re inviting her to join you for what’s supposed to be a relaxing event, but you’re sending all sorts of signals that there’s something intense or even dangerous in what you’re about to do. Why else would you need such hardcore preparation? Of course it’s going to be hard to fall asleep!
How do we avoid Sleep Effort and send relaxing signals to our body and mind instead? Let’s ditch conventional sleep hygiene rules and replace them with what actually matters.
The first thing to dismantle about Sleep Effort is the expectation that you can or should control when you fall asleep. Sleep is an involuntary behavior. No matter how hard you try, you cannot force yourself to fall asleep if your brain is just not ready, which usually means it’s not the right time in the 24-hour cycle or you haven’t earned enough sleep drive (a.k.a., your brain’s “hunger” for sleep). The most you can do is set the scene, so that when sleep is ready to come to you, you can be ready to welcome it—like being in a relaxing, dark room with cozy blankets, instead of totally unable to answer sleep’s call—like anxiously building up expectations for what’s going to happen with sleep tonight.
What does this mean practically speaking? It means that when you hear the sleep hygiene “rule” of going to bed and getting up at the same time every day, you should scratch the first half. Just get up at the same time (or around the same time, within about an hour’s wiggle room), and forget about going to bed at any specific time. Simply go to bed when you feel sleepy. At first, you might feel like you’re not getting sleepy until super late, but if you stick with getting up at the same time, your body will begin to make you sleepy at just the right time to give you the sleep you need.
One of the least popular sleep hygiene rules out there is the one banning screen use in the evening. Every once in a blue moon, one of my patients loves this idea, but usually, people try screen celibacy for a couple of days then go back to their evening social media and Netflix, feeling guilty that all this light in their eyes must be screwing up their sleep.
There is some basis in this sleep hygiene advice. Your circadian clock, a crucial part of good sleep, relies on the light coming into your eyes to stay tuned to the 24-hour world. It evolved in a world where there’s not much light after sunset—just the moon, stars, and campfires, so our modern evening lights can confuse the circadian system. That’s why too much screen use in the evening can suppress melatonin, the hormone that usually ramps up at night to give us good sleep.
But don’t worry, our circadian clocks are very smart. It can adapt to our modern life, as long as we give it clear signals. That is, as long as we still get lots of bright light exposure during the day, there will still be a big contrast between days and nights, even if we use screens in the evening. So get outside for at least 30 minutes per day or use a broad spectrum light box for 20 minutes in the morning. When you do use screens in the evening, dim them and turn on Night Shift mode (or the equivalent of this on your device) to decrease the amount of stimulating blue light. This will erase any confusion for your circadian clock and help you to get better quality sleep.
One of the biggest mistakes my insomnia patients make is meditating too hard. I don’t mean that meditation itself is bad for sleep. On the contrary, meditation can be very helpful for calming the body and mind. Research on mindfulness meditation and relaxation exercises, for example, has shown that daily practice can improve sleep quantity and quality.
But when we meditate with the specific goal of falling asleep, or in other words, we use meditation as a hammer to try to knock ourselves out…it often ends up backfiring. That’s because our intentions matter. Remember how we talked about sleep being an involuntary phenomenon? When the intention is to force this involuntary thing to happen, we are creating performance anxiety, which pushes sleep further away. It’s just like for sexual intimacy—if there’s a lot of pressure to perform, or expectation for our bodies to respond in a certain way on command, then we’re less likely to naturally respond in the desired way.
This is why I recommend not having meditation be the last thing you do before falling asleep. Do it before your bedtime routine, or as the first part of it. If you wake up during the night and want to meditate, ask yourself if you secretly hope that it will put you back to sleep. Either way, you can still meditate, but plan to listen to a podcast or read a book afterwards and allow sleep to come to you when it’s ready.
You’ve probably heard that you should avoid exercising at night so you don’t get too stimulated for sleep. But when researchers looked at all the available data, it turns out that this is a myth. Evening exercise is not harmful for sleep. In fact, it’s beneficial for sleep, including slightly increasing deep sleep percentage. So go ahead and hit the gym, go for a jog, or do yoga in the evening.
One thing I would recommend, though, is doing at least part of your workout mindfully. This means being fully in the here and now, without judgment. Practicing mindfulness is beneficial for every aspect of health and well-being, but the biggest barrier is that most people misunderstand what it means. When I said, “mindfulness,” you may have pictured someone sitting quietly in a bamboo forest with their eyes closed. But this is only one of many ways to be mindful! A true mindfulness practice is about bringing this philosophy of nonjudgmental present focus with you to any time and situation—including your workout.
Exercising mindfully means paying full attention to your body’s sensations, even if there’s a mixed bag of pleasant and unpleasant feelings. It means not being distracted by a TV, phone, music, or conversation. You don’t have to do it 100% of the time, but trying to mindfully run that last half mile or mindfully do those last few sets of weights can help you get out of your head and into your body, a skill that will level up your workout and help you to sleep better overall.
Remember Michelle, the insomnia patient I had with perfect sleep hygiene? I gave her permission to loosen up and have some fun in the evenings. She started back up with running club on Wednesday evenings, caught up watching White Lotus, and even went out with friends and had late cocktails once in a while. Suddenly, she felt much freer and less anxious, and even though she still occasionally took a while to fall asleep, she knew it was temporary and no longer felt like sleep was such a chore. She was friends with sleep again!
And if you’re worried about your sleep, especially if you struggle with falling or staying asleep, this is a first step you can take too. Let go of your preconceived notions about how sleep should be, and pay attention to what your body is telling you instead. Remember that sleep is a friend, not an engineering problem. And we have to start with listening in order to rediscover this beautiful relationship. With that, I wish you sweet dreams!
Thanks for listening to The Savvy Psychologist. I'm Dr. Jade Wu, and you can find my new book, Hello Sleep: the Science and Art of Overcoming Insomnia Without Medications, on Bookshop.org, Amazon, or on the shelves at your local bookstore. And don’t forget to check out the other two episodes in this sleep miniseries—we bust all kinds of sleep myths and talk about surprising tips for quieting your racing mind.