Want to sleep better? Spend LESS time in bed! Get help from an Austin sleep specialist.

I was quoted in a Forbes article about sleep hacks. Go here to read the full article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nomanazish/2025/01/31/the-surprising-sleep-hacks-sleep-specialists-swear-by/

Get out of bed for better sleep? Huh? That’s counterintuitive. A sleep specialist in Austin explains more.

The sleep hack I offered was to spend less time in bed. That’s right. Less.

Less?! How am I going to get sleep if I’m not in bed?

People with insomnia are usually problem solvers by nature. So, of course, they apply that problem-solving prowess to their sleep issue. The thinking is to maximize time spent in bed and cast a big, wide net to increase the probability of catching some sleep. It makes some logical sense. But it doesn’t work.

Here’s why.

You have a biological process formally called Process S that impacts your sleep. Process S is also called the sleep drive or sleep load. Sleep drive determines the amount of sleep you get and the quality of that sleep. Want more and better sleep? boost sleep drive. Or at least don’t undercut it.

Guess what completely undermines the development of sleep drive? Excessive time in bed relative to sleeping.

What’s excessive? For my insomnia clients, I calculate something called sleep efficiency. I look at total time asleep and divide that by total time in bed. It gives me a percentage that conveys the total time you are spending in bed and how much of that time you are actually sleeping. The optimal sleep efficiency is 85-90%. I’ve observed sleep efficiencies of 85-90% correlate with people feeling like they slept well. If it’s below 85%, you are spending too much time in bed and negatively impacting your sleep drive.

Sleep is homeostatic.

Your thermostat is set to maintain a certain temperature. Based on fluctuations in the temperature of your home, it turns on and off as needed. Sleep works in a similar way.

This means too much sleep results in a decrease in sleep drive and too little sleep results in an increase in sleep drive. Similar to eating, the longer you go without food, the hungrier you are. If you haven’t eaten in several hours, you might be feeling pretty hungry. But if you just ate a big meal, you never want to think about food again. Sleep works in the exact same way.

But wait…I have insomnia!! I’m not getting enough sleep as it is so why the #%^$ can’t I fall asleep? How is it that I am not accruing enough sleep debt to fall aslep?

Fair question! Here’s what’s going on. You’re lying in bed for long periods of time and likely getting microsleeps. They don’t feel like sleep and to your recollection you were wide awake the whole time. But those microsleeps consume little bits of sleep drive. It’s like eating too many chips at the Tex-Mex restaurant and then not wanting your food when it comes. Except in this scenario you were completely unaware that you ate any chips and are mystified to have no appetite when your food comes.

Your anxiety can also override your sleep drive.

Let’s say your smoke detector starts going off at 3:00 am. Your body has the capacity to temporarily override sleep-maintaining processes to get you to safety. The problem is you might be having false alarms. Something that feeds into these false alarms is sleep effort.

Sleep is an involuntary physiological process. Thus, trying to place sleep under voluntary control tends to make matters worse. Another thing I work on with my insomnia clients is performance anxiety around sleep.

Researchers have observed that people with insomnia have more success falling asleep when they try to remain awake. 

Trying to fall asleep results in pressure and expectation. Now you are paying attention and focusing on a task. So your brain is like “my human is concentrating and trying to complete a task. I will keep them awake.” To sleep, you must disengage.

Do you know any good sleepers? What do they do to sleep? Probably nothing. Do they think about sleep? Never. I bet they don’t even have good sleep hygiene!

People come to me expecting me to blast the smartphones and technology in general for being detrimental to sleep.

They’re not not a factor, I suppose, but they aren’t as significant as they’ve been made out to be. I always say if I had a limited amount of time to help someone sleep better I would focus on getting them out of bed when they’re not asleep and relaxing the sleep effort.

Are you struggling with insomnia? Would you like a sleep specialist to asses your individual situation and help you sleep better? Go here to learn more about how I work with insomnia and here to schedule a free phone consultation.