Sleep Isn’t the Problem — Effort Is

If you struggle with sleep, you’ve probably asked yourself some version of this question in the early hours of the morning: Why can’t I just sleep like everyone else?

You’re exhausted, your body feels heavy, and yet the moment your head hits the pillow your mind switches on, replaying the day, scanning ahead to tomorrow, and quietly panicking about how little rest you’re getting.

What often follows is a night of trying. Trying to relax. Trying to empty your mind. Trying to fall asleep properly because tomorrow matters and you can’t afford another bad night. And the harder you try, the more awake you seem to become.

This is where many people assume that sleep itself is the problem. But in reality, it usually isn’t. Effort is.

Sleep is a natural biological process. It isn’t something you have to learn, practise, or control. But once sleep becomes something you worry about, your nervous system begins to treat night-time as a problem to solve. Instead of resting, your body shifts into a state of alertness, monitoring and threat detection. From a cognitive behavioural perspective, this makes complete sense. A nervous system that feels on guard simply cannot allow sleep to take over, not because you are broken, but because it is doing exactly what it has learned to do.

This is why so many people tell me, “My body is tired, but my brain won’t switch off.” The tiredness is real. The difficulty comes from the mental effort layered on top of it.

One of the biggest traps with sleep is the belief that trying harder will help. In reality, effort keeps the brain engaged. The moment you start checking whether you feel relaxed enough, wondering how long you’ve been awake, or monitoring whether sleep is “working yet”, your nervous system stays switched on. Sleep requires the opposite conditions: safety, ease, and a lack of monitoring.

A helpful reframe is to stop aiming for sleep altogether and to aim instead for rest. Rest sends a very different message to the nervous system. It says there is nothing you need to achieve, nothing you need to fix, and nowhere you need to go. When that message lands, the system often begins to soften. Sometimes sleep follows quickly, sometimes it doesn’t, but even rest alone helps retrain the body away from night-time effort and alertness.

This is where hypnosis can be genuinely useful when it is used in a cognitive behavioural way. In this context, hypnosis is not about being “put to sleep” or losing control. It is a tool to reduce mental effort, calm hyperarousal, and shift attention away from constant monitoring. In other words, it helps people stop doing. When effort drops away, the body is often able to do what it has been trying to do all along.

This understanding is what led me to create a sleep audio called Letting Sleep Happen. It is designed to support rest rather than performance. There is nothing to concentrate on and nothing to get right. The aim is not to achieve sleep but to help the nervous system stop working so hard. If sleep arrives, that’s welcome. If it doesn’t, rest still matters, and over time that shift away from effort can make a real difference.

If you’ve been struggling with sleep, it’s most probably because your system has simply learned to associate night-time with effort and alertness.

Sleep isn’t the problem here.

Effort is!

And effort is something that can be gently unlearned.