Ironically, insomnia is also driven by the things we do to try to solve it, experts say. We start to chase sleep—waking up later, taking naps, going to bed too early. This diminishes our sleep drive, which is our body’s need for sleep. It makes it harder to sleep when we’re supposed to. And it creates a vicious cycle: More time in bed means more opportunity for frustration and failure. Before long, we’ve taught our brain to associate our bed with the negative emotions we feel lying there.
“It’s Pavlovian,” says Philip Cheng, a clinical psychologist and sleep researcher at the Henry Ford Sleep Disorders and Research Center. “If you spend a lot of time in bed worried and frustrated and miserable, in time your brain learns that your bed is a place to do all of these things but sleep.”
