📝 Articles Day 5

Can't Sleep? Try Getting Out of Bed

It’s 2 a.m., and you’ve been awake for an hour—staring at the same patch of ceiling, counting the same sheep, and doing increasingly alarming math about how wrecked you’re going to feel tomorrow. Your instinct is to stay right where you are and try harder. Surely sleep will come eventually. And even if it doesn’t, at least you’re resting—right?
Not exactly. The better move, sleep specialists say, is the one that feels most counterintuitive: Get up, leave the room, and do something else. The technique is called stimulus control, and it isn't new—psychologist Richard Bootzin introduced it in 1972, and it remains a cornerstone of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia.

Why lying in bed when you can't sleep makes it worse
The problem begins when you treat sleep like a task you need to accomplish. "Effort is the enemy of sleep," says Shelby Harris, a behavioral sleep medicine specialist in New York. The harder you work at it, the more frustrated and alert you become. People who sleep well, Harris points out, aren’t using some secret trick. “They don't really do anything,” Harris says. “They just fall asleep.”
Sleep, in other words, isn’t something you can will into happening, says Michael Perlis, director of the behavioral sleep medicine program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. It’s a physiological state, not a behavior you can perform on command.
Watching for sleep to arrive doesn’t work, either. People often report that they were close to drifting off, Perlis says, but if you’re conscious of being close, you’re still awake. After all, how can you consciously monitor yourself becoming unconscious? 

There’s one more argument for staying put: Even if you aren’t sleeping, you figure, at least you’re resting. Perlis rejects that one, too. "If rest was any good,” he says, “we wouldn't sleep.”

And the next time you’re lying awake at 2 a.m., furious that sleep hasn’t arrived, remember: The wakefulness isn’t necessarily the biggest problem. Your reaction to it might be. "Change the narrative," Harris says. "Trying to force it is only going to make it worse."

From time.com