In more than four decades of treating sleep disorders, anxiety, and stress, I have never once met a client whose sleep improved because they tried harder to fall asleep. Sleep is not a light switch you flip at ten o'clock — it is a gradual descent, a series of well-being processes, and the body needs a runway to gracefully embrace that first stage of sleep.
Too many of my clients treat bedtime as a single event: brush teeth, turn off the light, expect unconsciousness within minutes — the average time to fall asleep is actually 24 minutes. When sleep doesn't happen, frustration builds, and frustration is the single most reliable way I know to keep a nervous system awake.
Lack of sleep is only bad if you must drive, think, talk, move, be creative, or get things done properly.
I call this sequence of intentional behaviours the three stages of sleep hygiene: Relaxing, Resting, and Sleeping. Relaxing begins the disconnection from the demands of the workday. Resting builds the sensory bridge between your environment and true sleepiness. Sleeping is the final surrender — the stage where stimulation must stop entirely for sleep to arrive. Skipping straight from a work email to a dark, quiet room is like slamming on the brakes at highway speed. The three-stage approach gives your brain-mind-body the deceleration lane it was built to use.
Disconnecting from work stimulation — signalling safety and closure to the body.
Connecting brain, mind, and body to the next stage — building sensory cues that activate sleepiness.
Surrender, not effort — calming the breath and letting go.
I describe this stage as signalling safety and closure to the body from the (over)stimulating work world. Your nervous system genuinely cannot tell the difference between an urgent email and a mild threat — both raise cortisol and heart rate. I ask clients to treat the one-to-two-hour mark before bed as a hard line: work devices go into a drawer, not just a different app.
This is the natural window for dinner, for a real conversation with a partner or family member, for the light catch-up tasks that don't require heavy decision-making. If you exercise, this is your last call — vigorous movement raises core body temperature and adrenaline, both of which work against sleep onset for hours afterward. The same goes for alcohol: it may feel sedating in the moment, but it fragments sleep architecture later in the night. And if you use melatonin, tryptophan, or CBD, I always want that conversation to include your physician — not just a bottle from the pharmacy shelf or an Instagram post.
This is the stage where I ask clients to become, quite literally, the architect of their own sensory environment. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine, constantly reading cues from the room to decide whether it's safe to power down. Dim light, quiet sound, and a repetitive low-stimulation routine — the same book, the same tea, the same ten minutes — begin to function as a conditioned pathway into sleepiness and safety, the way a certain smell can return you instantly to a favourite café.
A light snack helps too: yogurt with a few blueberries and a little honey offers a gentle, steady release of the amino acids and glucose the brain uses to produce serotonin and, eventually, melatonin — without the digestive workload of a heavy meal. I ask clients to keep movement in this window playful and gentle, stretching rather than sprinting, and to spend a few minutes preparing the room itself: colder, darker, quieter. The environment should be doing part of the work before your head even hits the pillow.
Resting is the stage most clients breeze through too fast, or skip entirely — home, a bit of scrolling, dinner, straight to bed. You may arrive exhausted, but not relaxed and rested, which can cause a wide array of poor sleep. I get it: childcare, an urgent call from the boss, a last-minute deadline — a perfectly calm evening isn't always possible. But practiced regularly, mastering this stage reduces the stimulation your brain-mind-body is carrying, even if it can't remove it all.
This final stage is about surrender and acceptance that the day is over — not effort — and it's the one my clients most often get backwards. Trying hard to fall asleep is one of the most reliable ways I know to stay awake; the effort itself is a form of arousal, and arousal is biologically incompatible with sleep onset. I ask clients to remove devices from the bedroom entirely if they can, because even a dark phone screen is a decision point the brain doesn't need to be offered at eleven at night.
A brief calming breath practice — something that engages the vagus nerve, five minutes is plenty — makes the physiological case for rest. Twenty to twenty-four minutes to fall asleep is well within normal range; expecting instant unconsciousness only manufactures frustration where none needs to exist. A cooler room supports the natural overnight drop in core body temperature that enhances healthy sleep onset. And I love ending the day on something genuinely warm: picture two moments that made you smile or laugh, and let those be the last images your mind holds before it lets go.
Waking in the middle of the night — a bathroom trip, a snack craving, a bad dream, a stray sound — usually has several contributing factors worth exploring with a clinician. In the moment, the focus should simply be on relaxing the brain-mind-body: some gentle vagus-nerve tapping for 5 to 10 minutes, then waiting for sleep to take back over.
Across four decades of teaching, research, clinical practice, and coaching, I've watched the same four benefits show up again and again when clients commit to this sequence.
Reduces overstimulation by spacing out the transition from work mode to sleep mode
Supports nervous system regulation through consistent sensory and behavioural cues
Promotes better sleep readiness by aligning mind, body, and environment
Reduces bedtime frustration by normalizing that sleep is a process, not an instant switch
The goal is not to force sleep, but to create the conditions that make sleepiness — and then sleep — more likely.
If there's one thing I want you to take from these three stages, it's permission — permission to stop treating sleep as a task you either succeed or fail at each night, and start treating it as a runway you build, hour by hour, choice by choice, intentional behaviour by intentional behaviour. You don't need a perfect bedroom or a flawless routine. You need a repeatable, consistent one. Pick one small change from Stage 1 this week. Add Stage 2 next week. Let Stage 3 be the quiet landing you've already prepared for. Sleep was never meant to be forced; it was meant to be allowed.