Trending
Sleep is one of the most natural functions of the human body. No app is required, no certification, no seminar. A newborn does it, and so does an animal in the wild. For most of human history, when darkness came, so did rest.
And yet today, sleep has become one of the most common struggles in modern Western life.
This isn’t just something patients have told me over the years. I’ve had to work through it myself, more than once, lying there wondering why a body this tired couldn’t just switch off.
There were stretches in my life when I could move through an entire day without much anxiety at all: productive, focused, barely a stray thought. Then my head would hit the pillow and something would flip on. A conversation from three days earlier would replay itself, unprompted, with new lines I wished I’d said. A problem that felt manageable at noon would suddenly feel like it needed solving right now, at midnight, lying in the dark, eyes open. When these stretches occurred, I could almost always trace them to something else going on in my life. Not the sleep as a problem itself, but something underneath it, like a big test coming up.
My body was tired, actually exhausted. Whatever was running the show upstairs, though, was quite active. You see, sleep asks for something most of us are bad at giving: letting our guard down.
There’s a part of the brain whose whole job is scanning for possible threats. Not solving problems, exactly, just watching for danger, sniffing out risk before it arrives. Some may think this is our built-in survival instinct. But this part of the brain doesn’t know the difference between a bus swerving toward you and an email you haven’t answered yet. It reacts the same way to both. Survival is what happens on the occasions it happens to be right, not what it’s actually built to ensure. This part of our brain doesn’t reason. It associates closing your eyes in the dark with risk. And it’s automatic.
So when the lights go out, this part of our brain keeps working to pull your guard back up, distracting you and keeping you alert to potential danger.
It does this with real urgency, too, insisting that if you don’t solve this now, you’ll regret it, that if you don’t rehearse that conversation, you’ll fumble it tomorrow, that if you don’t replay the mistake, you’ll only make it again. This is what fight-or-flight looks like when it has nowhere to go: no threat to run from, no problem to actually solve, just a body lying still in the dark with its alarm system fully engaged.
Some people respond by fighting sleep. They force it. They actively try to relax, run through the breathing exercises someone once told them would help, or count sheep. For some people, those techniques genuinely do help. They never worked for me. The moment I felt myself starting to drift, some part of me would jolt awake again, as if the letting-go itself had tripped a wire.
Others flee instead of fight. One more scroll, one more distraction, anything so they don’t have to lie still with whatever’s unresolved, or lie there vulnerable.
Different strategies, same root cause: surrender equals potential danger.
It’s not a coincidence that sleep gets worse under stress, or the night before you already know something’s coming. Just like most anxiety, there’s usually something underneath it: some sense of unfinished business, some flicker of uncertainty. That vigilance senses it and stands guard instead of standing down.
I eventually learned that sleep can’t be forced. It can only be allowed because it, too, is automatic. Just as our brain is preprogrammed to scan for any possibility of danger, real or imagined, there are counterbalances to that which are also automatic, and sleep is one of them.
The technique I use to open the door to this automatic process is simple, and I mean that literally. It took me years to trust something this basic.
First, I picture a large whiteboard in my head. Whatever thought shows up, I write it across the board, and then I erase it. Not violently. Just steadily, the way you’d wipe down a counter. Another thought shows up, and I erase that one too. I’m not trying to win an argument with the thought or figure out if it’s important. I’m just trying to get back to blank space.
Then I imagine a push broom. Whatever’s left on the floor (old arguments, unfinished conversations, things I still haven’t figured out how to say to someone) I sweep into a pile and push it out of the room. Sometimes I picture it going over a cliff. The image doesn’t matter much. The motion of pushing it away does.
And the whole time, quietly, I say to myself: allow it to happen.
Not force it, just allow it. That word choice matters more than it sounds like it should. It’s the difference between wrestling something into submission and just stepping out of its way.
There’s usually a moment, once the board is clear and the floor is swept, when something shifts. Nothing dramatic. Just peaceful.
And that’s when sleep comes back. I didn’t beat it into submission. Instead, I finally stopped blocking the door.
We’ve made sleep so complicated. We track it and optimize it, then analyze the data in the morning like it’s a stock we’re trying to beat. Podcasters tell us that if we don’t get enough of it, we’re shortening our lifespan. There’s real value in understanding the physiology. But at its core, sleep is surrender to safety, practiced over and over, a repeated willingness to stop watching for a few hours.
If you’re lying awake right now, it doesn’t mean you’re broken. It might just mean the part of you built to watch for danger isn’t allowing you to clock out, subtly generating a low-level fear you’re not even fully aware of. And most of the time, that fear is lying.
It will tell you that if you let go, you’ll miss something, that relaxing is the same as being exposed.
It’s wrong about that. It’s usually wrong about most things at 2 a.m.
Your body already knows how to sleep. It always has.
Sometimes it just needs you to get out of the way and let it.
Related: The One Thing You Should Never Forget About Yourself