Why Can’t I Sleep?

Sleep is the barometer of your mental health.

Before I start, I acknowledge that this article steps slightly outside of my scope as a psychologist. It is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Medications, supplements, and sleep aids mentioned here, including benzodiazepines, melatonin, and herbal supplements, can carry risks, side effects, and interactions with other medications. Please consult your GP, psychiatrist, or pharmacist before starting, stopping, or combining any sleep medication or supplement, particularly if you are currently taking other prescribed medication. If sleep difficulties are persistent or significantly affecting your daily functioning, please seek individual advice from a qualified health professional.

If you've ever started therapy, there's a good chance one of the first questions you were asked wasn't about your mood, or your relationships, or what brought you in. It was about your sleep.

How are you sleeping? Are you falling asleep okay? Are you waking through the night? Are you waking up too early and unable to get back to sleep?

This isn't small talk. Psychologists ask about sleep first because it tells us something most other questions can't. Sleep is one of the most sensitive indicators we have of what's actually happening underneath. Whether someone is dealing with depression, anxiety, grief, or chronic stress, sleep architecture tends to shift early, often before the person themselves has consciously connected the dots between what's going on in their life and what's happening at three in the morning.

I want to write about this honestly, including from my own experience, because I think the way we talk about sleep in mental health is often too simple. It gets reduced to "good sleep hygiene" as though that's the whole story. It isn't.

What Disrupted Sleep Actually Looks Like

Sleep problems aren't one thing. There's difficulty falling asleep, lying there with a mind that won't slow down. There's difficulty staying asleep, waking at 2am or 4am for no apparent reason, sometimes with a racing heart, sometimes just abruptly alert. There's early waking, where your body decides the night is over well before you're rested. And there's the particular exhaustion of broken, fragmented sleep, where you've technically been in bed for eight hours but never moved through the deeper stages that actually restore you.

Each of these can point to something slightly different, but they share a common thread. They usually reflect a nervous system that hasn't settled, even if the conscious mind believes everything is fine.

A Personal Example

I'll step slightly outside my usual scope here, because I think it's useful, and because this happened to me directly.

A few years ago, following a difficult incident in my life, I went through about three months of disrupted sleep. The strange part was that, cognitively, I had processed what happened. I understood it, I'd made sense of it, I felt at peace with it in my thinking. But my body hadn't caught up. I was still walking around with elevated cortisol, the kind of low hum of physiological alert that doesn't necessarily feel like panic, but feels like an inability to properly switch off. I had unending energy - a kind of wiredness underneath everything.

Nothing else in my life had changed. I was still training at the gym five days a week (okay, three or four - but still…). Work and relationships were steady. From the outside, everything looked normal. But my sleep told a different story, because my body was holding something my mind thought it had processed.

That's the thing about sleep. It doesn't lie, and it doesn't always wait for your conscious permission to register that something is unresolved.

Why This Matters the Next Day

Poor sleep doesn't just make you tired. It directly affects the systems you rely on to manage your mental health day to day.

When sleep is disrupted, your capacity to filter out negative or intrusive thoughts weakens considerably. Things that you'd normally let pass without much weight start to stick. Your ability to stay focused and present drops. Executive functioning, the part of your brain responsible for planning, decision-making, and emotional regulation, becomes noticeably less reliable.

This creates a feedback loop. Poor sleep affects mental health, and declining mental health affects sleep. Each one feeds the other, which is why addressing sleep early, rather than waiting for it to resolve on its own, matters more than people often assume.

What People Usually Try First

When sleep becomes a problem, most people jump straight to medication, usually because it feels like the fastest fix. I want to talk through this honestly, including the risks, because not all options carry the same weight.

Benzodiazepines are commonly prescribed for sleep, but they carry real risk. Tolerance builds quickly, meaning the effective dose creeps upward over time, and dependence can develop. They're not something to take lightly or for an extended period, and this is worth discussing carefully with a prescribing doctor.

Sleeping tablets more broadly can also create a different kind of problem. They often leave people groggy the next day, and over time, they can interfere with your brain's learned ability to fall and stay asleep on its own. Sleep, at its core, is something your brain learns, a rhythm it builds and reinforces over time. Medication can override that rhythm in the short term, but it doesn't teach your brain anything new. When you stop, the underlying pattern is often still there, unaddressed.

Melatonin is a more natural option that some people find helpful. It's a hormone your brain already produces as part of your circadian rhythm, so supplementing it isn't introducing something foreign. That said, it affects people differently. In my own case, trialling melatonin left me feeling tired into the following day, which wasn't sustainable given the kind of work I do. This is genuinely individual, and worth trialling cautiously rather than assuming it will work the same way for you as it does for someone else.

Other supplements that come up frequently, often through naturopaths or holistic practitioners, include magnesium (particularly magnesium glycinate), ashwagandha, tart cherry extract, and valerian root. Some people report vivid dreams or increased dream recall on certain supplements, which is worth knowing going in. These can be worth researching and trialling to see what suits you, but if you're taking antidepressants or any other medication, please check for interactions with a doctor or pharmacist first. Supplements aren't automatically risk-free simply because they're natural.

Sleep Hygiene: Necessary, But Not Sufficient

You've probably heard the standard advice. No screens an hour before bed. Consistent wind-down routine. Same sleep and wake time every day. Cool, dark room. Limit caffeine after midday.

This advice is good. I'm not going to tell you to ignore it. But I want to be honest about its limits, because I think this is where a lot of people get stuck and start to feel like failures.

During my own three months of poor sleep, my sleep hygiene was, by most standards, immaculate. I had the wind-down routine. No screens. Consistent timing. All of it. And I still wasn't sleeping properly.

Here's what I took from that. Sleep hygiene is necessary, but it isn't sufficient on its own, particularly when what's disrupting your sleep is physiological, like elevated cortisol, rather than purely behavioural. If your nervous system is still holding onto something unresolved, no amount of avoiding blue light is going to override that. Sleep hygiene sets the conditions for good sleep. It doesn't address the underlying activation that's preventing it.

This isn't a reason to abandon good sleep habits. It's a reason to understand that they're one piece, not the whole solution.

What Actually Helped: Active, Intentional Wind-Down

What made more of a difference for me, and what I'd encourage people to take seriously rather than treating as an afterthought, was actively and intentionally engaging in practices that help the nervous system downregulate before bed.

This isn't passive. It's not simply avoiding stimulation. It's actively doing something that signals safety to your body. This might look like slow, deliberate breathing exercises specifically aimed at activating the parasympathetic nervous system. Guided meditations, particularly ones designed for sleep. Sound healing or binaural-style audio. Progressive muscle relaxation. Any practice that asks your body to consciously shift out of alert mode rather than just hoping it happens on its own once the lights go off.

The difference between this and standard sleep hygiene is intention. Sleep hygiene removes obstacles. These practices actively work on regulating the underlying physiological state that's keeping you wired in the first place. For a nervous system still carrying unresolved stress or cortisol, this active downregulation tends to matter more than passive avoidance of screens.

What This Means for You

If your sleep has changed and you can't quite explain why, I'd encourage you not to dismiss it. It often means something, even if you haven't consciously connected it to anything in particular. Your mind might have processed an event, a stressor, a loss. Your body sometimes takes longer.

There isn't a single fix that works for everyone. Medication has its place but carries real considerations. Natural supplements are worth exploring but require care, especially around interactions. Sleep hygiene matters but won't address everything on its own. And active nervous system regulation, the intentional, practiced kind, deserves more attention than it usually gets.

If disrupted sleep has been going on for a while, or if it's affecting your ability to function, concentrate, or manage your mood during the day, it's worth talking to someone about it. Not because something is wrong with you, but because sleep really is one of the clearest signals we have that something underneath needs attention.

It was for me. It often is for the people I work with too.