Have you ever lain awake at 2am doing the maths on how many hours you have left before the alarm goes off? The more you calculate, the further sleep slips away. If that sounds familiar, you're in good company — around one in three people struggle to get a good night's sleep. And here's the part that frustrates me most: almost none of us were ever taught how.
Why Most Sleep Advice Doesn't Work
We spend roughly a third of our lives asleep, and the quality of that third shapes almost everything about the other two. Your mood, your focus, your appetite, your resilience under stress, even your risk of an accident at work — all of it traces back to how well you slept.
I sat down with Dr Damon Ashworth, a clinical psychologist who has been researching sleep since 2010 and is the author of Deliberately Better Sleep. What struck me most was his observation about where people go wrong. It isn't a lack of effort. It's that people try a dozen things at once, get worried when nothing shifts, and can spend years in that loop before seeking proper help. And when they do see a doctor, they're often handed sleeping pills — which nobody considers a good long-term answer.
Damon's clinical trial looked at people who had been prescribed antidepressants but weren't improving. Often the missing piece was their sleep. When the sleep was treated directly using cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), sleep improved — and mood, anxiety, stress and fatigue improved alongside it. The good news is that once you're doing the right things, change can come quickly.
Sleep Pressure: The Tank You Need to Fill
This is the concept I wish everyone understood. Sleep pressure — sometimes called homeostatic pressure — is your brain's accumulating need for sleep. The longer you've been awake, the higher it climbs. Staying awake after 30 hours is brutal; after three hours it's effortless. That's sleep pressure at work.
You want that pressure to be high when your head hits the pillow. Roughly 15 to 16 hours of wakefulness usually does it. So if you're up at 7am, going to bed before 10pm is likely to leave you lying there frustrated — and 11pm might serve you better.
Three things reliably build sleep pressure: physical movement during the day, cognitively demanding work, and going easy on the naps. Three things drain it: long daytime naps, going to bed too early, and caffeine. On that last one, caffeine has a half-life of around four and a half hours, so a strong 200mg coffee still leaves about 50mg in your system nine hours later. Try to keep caffeine to before 2pm.
Your Body Clock, and Why Mondays Feel So Rough
Your circadian rhythm runs on roughly a 24-hour cycle. Cortisol rises in the morning to get you going. Growth hormone peaks early in the night to help you repair. Melatonin climbs through the evening and stays high overnight to keep you asleep.
The single most useful thing you can do is keep your sleep and wake times consistent. If you're up at 6am on weekdays and sleeping until midday on weekends, you're creating what's known as social jet lag — you've effectively pushed your body clock backwards, which is why Sunday night is hard and Monday feels awful. A one-hour sleep-in on weekends is fine, two at a stretch, but much beyond that and you'll pay for it.
Light is your other lever. Twenty to thirty minutes of morning sunlight helps anchor your body clock forward. Interestingly, newer research suggests that getting morning light may matter more than avoiding screens at night. Damon still recommends easing off bright screens in the couple of hours before bed — not so much for the blue light, but because scrolling keeps you mentally activated when you're trying to wind down.
Sleep Hygiene: Only the Parts That Apply to You
Here's where I think conventional advice does people a disservice. Hand someone a list of 19 sleep hygiene rules and they have no idea which one matters. The research doesn't support the scattergun approach — but targeted behavioural change makes a real difference.
So do an honest audit instead. Are you trying to sleep with light coming into the room? Are you drinking a lot of coffee? Alcohol is worth a close look too — it may help you fall asleep faster, but it disrupts REM sleep, which is when you process emotions. Notice how you feel the day after drinking compared with a day after none. For most people, more than two standard drinks in a sitting starts to cost you.
On food: timing matters more than content. A big meal at 10 or 11pm keeps your resting heart rate elevated for hours. Aim to finish eating two to three hours before bed, with a light snack being no real problem.
Winding Down: What Actually Calms the Body
The relaxation technique with the strongest evidence behind it is progressive muscle relaxation — tensing a muscle group, breathing in deeply, then releasing the tension as you exhale. Work through arms, head and neck, shoulders, stomach, thighs, then calves and feet.
Slow diaphragmatic breathing helps too, and for people who struggle specifically with falling asleep, visualisation works well: picture a genuinely relaxing place and engage every sense in it.
Damon also rated stimulus control among his most effective strategies: only go to bed when you're sleepy, get up and do something calm if you can't drift off within 15 to 20 minutes, reserve the bed for sleep and sex, and get up at the same time every morning.
Key Takeaways
- Aim for 15 to 16 hours of wakefulness before bed so your sleep pressure is high enough.
- Keep your wake time consistent — including weekends — and use an alarm if you tend towards being a night owl.
- Get 20 to 30 minutes of morning sunlight; it may matter more than avoiding evening screens.
- Cut caffeine after 2pm, and keep alcohol to two standard drinks or fewer.
- Finish your last substantial meal two to three hours before bed.
- Build a genuine wind-down routine — progressive muscle relaxation has the best evidence behind it.
- Before reaching for supplements, work through the lifestyle strategies first.
Where This Fits in the Bigger Picture
What I love about Damon's approach is how closely it mirrors the way I work with clients at me&my wellness. There's no single fix and no magic supplement. Instead there are three honest questions worth asking yourself tonight: is my sleep pressure high enough, am I going to bed at the right time for my body, and is my arousal level low enough to let me drift off?
Sleep doesn't sit in isolation. It's woven through your nutrition, your movement, your stress and your relationships — which is exactly why treating it holistically works better than chasing one tactic at a time. Start with the question that lands closest to home for you, give it two or three weeks, and notice what shifts.
Want to go deeper on this? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with Anthony at meandmywellness.com.au