Why can’t I sleep?

One of the most difficult elements of struggling with insomnia is not understanding why you can’t sleep. You are probably doing all the right things – limiting caffeine, keeping the temperature low, staying away from your phone etc. – but you still wake up at 3am every night. Why? Is there something wrong with you? Is your sleep broken? Will you ever be able to sleep normally again?

‘Why can’t I sleep?’ was one of the top five most googled questions about sleep last year, generating almost 90,000 searches per month, so you are not alone in wanting to know the answer to this question. And there is no shortage of articles on the internet offering explanations, some blaming exercise in the evening or spicy food for dinner, others blue light from devices or the wrong pillow/mattress/duvet/sheets. But very few of these articles explain what’s really going on . . .

As a result, it can feel like sleep is incredibly complicated, especially when you are still awake at two o’clock in the morning for the third night in a row, but what no one is telling you is that sleeping is actually very simple. It’s a passive process like breathing, digesting or growing a beard (meaning we don’t have to do anything to make it happen) and an innate ability that we share with almost every other living creature on earth (meaning we don’t have to learn how to do it). But, if it’s that simple, why does it so often go wrong?

Explaining why we struggle to sleep on a regular basis or develop full-blown insomnia is also simple, because, once you have ruled out any underlying medical conditions and sleep disorders and you have removed noisy neighbours or traffic from the equation, there are only two things that cause regular sleep disturbance – lack of sleep drive and hyperarousal, or quite often a combination of the two.

Think of sleep drive as your appetite or hunger for sleep. It starts low when you wake up in the morning (in normal circumstances) and builds through the day until it is at its strongest around bedtime. All being well, hungry for sleep, you will then fall asleep quickly and easily. Unless, that is, you are too hyperaroused. Hyperarousal is the state of nervous tension that is triggered by the sympathetic nervous system in the presence of stress, fear and caffeine. Its main function is to keep you on high alert, ready for any eventuality, even when all you want to do is nod off. The way that these two elements work together dictates whether you will fall asleep or not.

To illustrate this relationship, imagine a car with an accelerator that is fuelled by sleep drive and a brake that is operated by hyperarousal. When we get into bed, we put our foot on the accelerator and the car should move forward to sleep . . . But what if there is no fuel? If your sleep drive is not strong enough, the car will not move. Some nights there is enough fuel/sleep drive to start the car, but hyperarousal puts the break on. If hyperarousal levels are too high, no matter how much sleep drive you have built up, you will not fall asleep . . . It's like flooring the accelerator with the handbrake on. Only by addressing these essential factors will you sort out your sleep issues.

So, why can’t you sleep? Because you don’t have enough sleep drive, have too much hyperarousal or a combination of the two.

Is there something wrong with you? No, other than you’re not getting enough sleep at the moment.

Is your sleep broken? No, it’s impossible to ‘break’ sleep.

Will you ever be able to sleep normally again? Absolutely. I’d love to show you how.