Healthy Sleep
Why You Can't Sleep — And Why Trying Harder Makes It Worse
A newsletter article by Ian Traynar
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Let me ask you something honest.
When did sleep stop being something that just happened — and start being something you had to manage?
Most people with persistent sleep problems can remember the turning point. Not the first bad night — that's normal, and almost everyone has those. The turning point is subtler. It's the moment when you started paying attention to sleep. When you began to think about it, plan around it, worry about it. When sleep became a project.
That shift is worth examining. Because in my experience, it's not just a symptom of the problem. For many people, it's the engine keeping the problem running.
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What Actually Happens When Sleep Becomes a Problem?
The science of insomnia is well established. Sleep is governed by two main systems: a sleep drive (which builds the longer you've been awake, like hunger builds the longer you haven't eaten), and a body clock (which signals when it's time to sleep and when it's time to be alert). When these two systems are working together, sleep is largely automatic — something your body does without your conscious involvement.
The word automatic is important here. The process of falling asleep is designed to happen without you. The moment you try to consciously manage it, you interfere with it. As the Insomnia Clinic's* research puts it: "The harder we try to sleep, the harder it is to get to sleep." This is not a paradox. It is the system working exactly as designed. Your brain interprets effort as a signal that something important is happening — and responds by keeping you alert.
So the first thing worth understanding is this: insomnia is not a failure of your body to sleep. It is your body doing exactly what it's been trained to do.
The question is: what has it been trained to do, and why?
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The Pattern Beneath the Pattern
CBT for insomnia — the NHS-recommended approach — does a good job of identifying the behaviours that perpetuate poor sleep: lying in bed awake for long periods, napping during the day, drinking caffeine to compensate, spending hours on your phone hoping sleep will arrive. These are real contributors, and addressing them matters.
But there is a layer beneath the behaviours that CBT often doesn't reach. And that layer is the story you have quietly built about yourself as a sleeper.
Here is what I mean by that.
When sleep problems persist, something more than a bad habit develops. You begin to organise your sense of yourself around your relationship with sleep. You start to hold beliefs like: "I am someone who doesn't sleep well." "I am not good at switching off." "I need eight hours or I'm no good to anyone." These aren't just thoughts. They become part of how you understand yourself — part of your identity.
And once that happens, the problem has moved to a different level. You are no longer dealing with a behaviour. You are dealing with a deeply held story about who you are — and your brain is working hard every night to prove that story right.
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How the Story Keeps Itself Alive
This is the part that most approaches to insomnia miss entirely.
When you carry the identity "I am a poor sleeper," your brain becomes very good at finding evidence to support it. You wake at 3am and think: "There it is again. I knew this would happen." That moment gets stored as vivid confirmation. The six nights last month when you slept through? Those are harder to recall. They don't feel significant. They don't fit the story, so your brain doesn't flag them.
This is not a character flaw. It is something the human brain does for everyone, about everything. But when the story you've built is "I can't sleep," this tendency becomes self-perpetuating. You are, in effect, mentally collecting all the evidence for your insomnia — and disregarding all the times when you did sleep well.
The result is that the story feels more and more certain. And the more certain it feels, the more your nervous system organises itself around it. You go to bed already braced. Already watchful. Already in a state of low-level alertness that is the precise opposite of what sleep requires.
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A Concrete Example
Consider two people who both have a poor night's sleep before an important meeting.
The first person thinks: "That was a rough night. I'll be a bit tired today — I'll manage." They drink some water, get on with the day, and by the following night the episode is largely forgotten.
The second person thinks: "I knew this would happen. I never sleep well when something important is coming up. What if I can't function tomorrow? I need to make sure I sleep tonight." They go to bed the following evening already monitoring themselves. Already trying. Already scanning every sensation as potential evidence of another bad night.
The difference between these two people is not their biology. It is the meaning they have attached to the experience — and the story about themselves that meaning has started to build.
The first person has a bad night. The second person is beginning to become a poor sleeper.
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What Changes When You Work at This Deeper Level
The CBT approach asks: what behaviours are making this worse, and how do we change them? That is useful work - balancing the sleep drive and the body clock, so important. Sleep hygiene matters — a cool, dark, quiet bedroom; consistent wake times; reducing caffeine; getting out of bed when you can't sleep rather than lying there training your body to associate the bed with wakefulness. These are real interventions and they produce real results.
But they don't address the deeper question: who do you believe yourself to be in relation to sleep?
The coaching approach I use starts there. Not with the behaviours, but with the full picture. What are you paying attention to? What are you leaving out? When you look honestly across the whole range of your experience — not just the bad nights, but all of it — what is actually true?
Most people, when they do this honestly, discover something surprising. The evidence for "I am a poor sleeper" is narrower than it felt. There are nights they'd forgotten — nights that were fine. Periods when sleep came easily. Times when they functioned perfectly well despite a difficult night. When that evidence is genuinely included — not just acknowledged and set aside — the story begins to change.
Not because they've been told to think positively. But because they've allowed themselves to see the whole picture, not just the part that confirms what they already feared.
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The Question Worth Asking
What have you made sleep mean?
For many people with persistent insomnia, sleep has come to mean something like: proof of my capacity to cope; evidence of whether I'm in control; a measure of whether tomorrow will be manageable. When sleep carries that weight, the body cannot treat it as an automatic process. It has become too important. Too loaded. Too much is riding on it.
The way through is not to try harder to sleep. It is to examine — carefully and honestly — what sleep has come to represent in your sense of yourself, and to look at the full picture until the story you're carrying reflects something more accurate than "I am someone who cannot sleep."
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A Practical Starting Point
Tonight, before you go to bed, try this.
Rather than thinking about whether you'll sleep, spend two minutes recalling specific times when you did sleep well, or when you coped better than expected after a poor night. Not to convince yourself of anything. Simply to remind yourself that those nights existed — because they did, and your brain has been quietly leaving them out.
You are not trying to override the problem with positive thinking. You are trying to give yourself a more honest picture.
Sleep is, at its core, an automatic process. Your body knows how to do it. What gets in the way is the story that has formed around the problem — the nightly vigilance, the collected evidence of failure, the identity that has learned to expect wakefulness and prepares for it accordingly.
When that story begins to change, sleep often follows. Not because you forced it. But because you stopped providing the conditions that made it impossible.
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Ian Traynar is a coach who works at the level of identity — helping people examine the stories they carry about themselves and see whether those stories reflect the full picture. His work draws on the methodology of the late, Steve Andreas. If you'd like to explore what this kind of coaching could offer you, you're welcome to get in touch.
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This and more will be covered in more depth here. Click here for the 6-week course Architects of Success.
* The Insomnia Clinic can be found here: https://www.theinsomniaclinic.co.uk/
