Most people with chronic insomnia aren’t just tired, they’re in a quiet war with a part of themselves. Your sleep mindset might be what’s keeping the cycle going.
Insomnia is the one condition where the standard cultural advice — try harder, optimize more, add another protocol to your stack — reliably makes things worse. People who have spent years adding to their wind-down routine are not failing at sleep because they haven’t tried enough. The trying itself is the wakefulness.
You’ve done everything right: dark room, no screens, no caffeine. And you’re still awake. If sleep hygiene isn’t working for your insomnia, it’s not because you’re doing it wrong. It’s because sleep hygiene was never designed to treat chronic insomnia. Here’s what the research says, and what actually works.
You’ve probably heard that everyone needs eight hours, that insomnia will go away once your stress does, or that sleeping in on the weekend will fix everything. None of that is true and some of it is making your sleep worse. Here are five insomnia myths worth letting go of, and what actually works instead.
Sleep trackers promise better rest, but for some people they do the opposite. This guide explains how sleep trackers can help identify patterns, when they fuel anxiety and insomnia, and what orthosomnia is—the perfectionistic pursuit of “perfect” sleep that actually makes sleep worse. Learn how to tell whether your tracker is helping or harming your sleep.
