From time.com
It's 2 a.m., and you’ve been awake for an hour—staring at the same patch of ceiling, counting the same sheep, and doing increasingly alarming math about how wrecked you’re going to feel tomorrow. Your instinct is to stay right where you are and try harder. Surely sleep will come eventually. And even if it doesn’t, at least you’re resting—right?
Not exactly. The better move, sleep specialists say, is the one that feels most counterintuitive: Get up, leave the room, and do something else. The technique is called stimulus control, and it isn't new—psychologist Richard Bootzin introduced it in 1972, and it remains a cornerstone of cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia.
Here’s how to do it when you can’t get to sleep, and why it works.
Why lying in bed when you can't sleep makes it worse
The problem begins when you treat sleep like a task you need to accomplish. "Effort is the enemy of sleep," says Shelby Harris, a behavioural sleep medicine specialist in New York. The harder you work at it, the more frustrated and alert you become. People who sleep well, Harris points out, aren’t using some secret trick. “They don't really do anything,” Harris says. “They just fall asleep.”
Sleep, in other words, isn’t something you can will into happening, says Michael Perlis, director of the behavioural sleep medicine program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. It’s a physiological state, not a behaviour you can perform on command.
Watching for sleep to arrive doesn’t work, either. People often report that they were close to drifting off, Perlis says, but if you’re conscious of being close, you’re still awake. After all, how can you consciously monitor yourself becoming unconscious?
There’s one more argument for staying put: Even if you aren’t sleeping, you figure, at least you’re resting. Perlis rejects that one, too. "If rest was any good,” he says, “we wouldn't sleep.”
How long should you stay in bed before getting up?
People are often told to get out of bed after about 20 minutes awake. But many clinicians have moved away from enforcing that rigid cut-off, partly because there’s an obvious problem with it, Harris says: You can't time 20 minutes without looking at a clock—and clock-watching in the middle of the night is a reliable way to become even more stressed about not sleeping.
Instead of watching the clock, notice your mood. The signal is frustration: Your mind is racing, you’re getting annoyed, or you catch yourself actively trying to force sleep to happen. "That's the sign that's usually around 20-ish minutes," Harris says. "Get out of bed, go do something else just to pass the time, and only go back to bed when you think you might be sleepy again."
That doesn’t mean you need to leap out of bed the moment you open your eyes. If you're awake but calm—not spiralling, not straining—you can stay put for a little while. Give yourself a few minutes to see what happens. The time to get up is when your mind starts racing or you notice yourself trying to force sleep.
Why getting out of bed helps you fall asleep faster
Perlis sums up his advice in a simple slogan: “Give up. Get up. Get out.” Giving up means abandoning the effort to fall asleep. Getting up and leaving the room make that decision real: Sitting up, standing, and walking send powerful signals to the body to be awake.
That might sound backward. If your goal is sleep, why would you make yourself more awake? But that’s exactly the point. When you stay in bed trying, Perlis says, you can end up “surfing,” or flickering between wakefulness and sleep without ever feeling as though you slept at all. “You get nothing from surfing,” he says.
Becoming fully awake interrupts that pattern and allows sleep pressure—the biological drive that makes you sleepy—to build. Perlis compares it to putting money in the bank for tomorrow night: Even if getting up doesn’t rescue this particular night, it can improve your odds of sleeping better the next one.
Leaving the bedroom also helps preserve the connection between your bed and sleep. The more time you spend there tossing, turning, worrying, and watching the clock, the more your brain begins to associate bed with wakefulness and frustration. Getting up breaks that association—and, as Perlis puts it, helps “give sleep a chance” a little later on.
What to do in the middle of the night when you can't sleep
Whatever you choose to do once you’re out of bed, your goal shouldn’t be to do something tiring, Harris says. The activity is simply something to do until sleepiness returns—while keeping you from lying in bed and teaching your brain to associate your mattress with frustration. So pick something you actually enjoy.
“I collect cookbooks—old cookbooks—and I look through my old cookbook collection,” Harris says. “I go to my kitchen and then I earmark old family recipes. I love beautiful photos in cookbooks, and I’ll just look at things that I might want to make at some point.” The screen-free ritual passes the time without turning sleep into another task. “I’m not sitting there saying, ‘I gotta get sleepy,’” she says.
Throughout her 20-plus years of practice, Harris has also seen patients take up art projects and knit what she affectionately calls “insomnia scarves.”
The key is that you shouldn’t make your middle-of-the-night activity feel like punishment. Harris recalls a colleague who used to tell patients to go sit in their "insomnia chair"—and now those patients "dread that chair because they associate it with wakefulness." It’s better to do something you'd genuinely choose, and to see it as a pleasant way to pass the time, not proof that the entire night has gone off the rails.
A few ground rules can help the technique work better:
Don't give insomnia a job
If you turn 3 a.m. into bonus productivity time, your brain might decide it’s worth continuing to wake you up around that time. “Don’t do your work. Don’t do taxes. Don’t do bills,” Harris says. “The more you wake up and do work, the more you’re teaching your body to have those awakenings.”
Skip screens when you can
Phones and laptops can pull you into texts, work emails, and other messages—and make it difficult to put the device back down. Some research also suggests that blue-enriched screen light may interfere with sleep. If a screen is your only realistic alternative to lying in bed with a racing mind, watch an episode of something you enjoy. Just treat it as a backup plan rather than your first choice.
Switch on a lamp
You don’t need to keep the room dark in an effort to coax yourself back to sleep, Harris says. Turn on a lamp and use enough light to comfortably do whatever activity you’ve chosen.
Don't fall asleep on the couch
Do it often enough, and you'll train yourself to sleep there and dread your own bed. When sleepiness hits, get up and walk back to your bedroom.
Plan for your excuses now
Don’t wait until the middle of the night to figure out where you’ll go or what you’ll do. “You have to think about all the excuses you’re going to come up with at night,” Harris says. “Think about it during the day, and problem-solve for those.”
If the rest of your home is cold, for instance, “keep a robe and slippers right next to your bed,” she says, and consider leaving an electric blanket in the room where you plan to go. Choose your activity in advance, too, and have your book, magazine, cookbook, or art supplies ready.
You can also adapt the technique to your circumstances. If you live in a studio or don’t want to disturb your partner, sit up in bed or move to a nearby chair. Harris also recommends remaining seated in bed if you take medication that makes you groggy or you have an increased risk of falling.
Once you feel sleepy again—and perhaps notice yourself yawning—return to bed. “See what happens,” Harris says. If your mind starts racing or you become frustrated again, “get back out, rinse, and repeat.” You might need to do that multiple times in one night.
If you’ve been practicing stimulus control for two or three weeks, while maintaining a consistent bedtime and wake time, and your sleep hasn’t improved, Harris recommends seeing a sleep specialist. They can screen for conditions like sleep apnoea and determine whether you might benefit from a fuller course of cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia.
And the next time you’re lying awake at 2 a.m., furious that sleep hasn’t arrived, remember: The wakefulness isn’t necessarily the biggest problem. Your reaction to it might be. "Change the narrative," Harris says. "Trying to force it is only going to make it worse."
https://time.com/article/2026/07/28/what-to-do-when-you-cant-sleep/
