Where sleep went

You used to sleep. Then something happened: a diagnosis in the house, a new baby, a job, a loss, a run of bad nights that turned into a habit. Now bed is a place where you lie awake, and the harder you try, the worse it gets. This course is six short lessons that put sleep back, one piece at a time, starting from the morning rather than the night.

Two systems

Your sleep runs on two things. The first is pressure: the longer you are awake, the sleepier you get, like a weight building through the day. The second is a clock, set mostly by daylight, that tells your body when it is night. Good sleep happens when the pressure is high and the clock says night at the same moment.

Almost everything that goes wrong with sleep is one of those two being knocked off. Naps and lie-ins bleed off the pressure. Late screens and irregular mornings confuse the clock. Worry does its own damage, which we will come to, but it does most of it through these two.

What this course draws on

The lessons here follow the shape of cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, usually shortened to CBT-I. It is a set of habits and ways of thinking, not a medicine, and it is what sleep clinics tend to teach first. We are not a clinic. This is the plain version of those habits, for a person with a life, written so you can start tonight. Where your sleep needs more than habits, we say so.

What you will do

Over six lessons you will fix your getting-up time and let bedtime follow it. You will build an hour before bed that tells the clock what is coming. You will make the bed a place for sleep only, and learn what to do when you wake at three. You will give worry a time and a page that is not the pillow. And you will learn how to keep it all when a bad week comes, because one will.

None of it is complicated. All of it takes a couple of weeks to show, so the course asks for patience more than effort.

What it is not

If you snore loudly with pauses, wake gasping, or are exhausted every day despite enough hours in bed, that can be sleep apnoea, and no habit fixes it. See a doctor first. The same if your sleep changed suddenly along with your mood, your weight or your pain. The habits here sit alongside medical care, never instead of it.

The practice

For the next seven nights, keep a simple diary. Each morning, write five things: what time you got into bed, roughly when you fell asleep, how many times you woke, what time you got up, and how rested you feel out of ten. Guess the times; do not watch the clock. That is all. Do not change anything yet. We need to see where sleep actually is before we move it.

This week

Keep the diary every morning for seven days. Change nothing else. If you want one thing to do tonight, turn the clock to the wall.