We can’t just flick a switch and turn our brains off for the night. But staying up and feeling awful the next day doesn’t exactly sound appealing.
Below, we’ll dive into whether you should stay up if you can’t sleep and how to do it correctly to avoid further disrupting your sleep and next-day energy levels. We’ll also cover how the RISE app can help you fall asleep faster in the first place.
“You should stay up if you can’t sleep," says Dr. Chester Wu. "But instead of giving up on sleep, do a sleep reset. This involves doing something relaxing in a different room until you feel sleepy. This way, you’re not forcing sleep, which unfortunately won’t work, you’re allowing sleep to happen when your body’s ready.”
Dr. Chester Wu is double board certified in Psychiatry and Sleep Medicine, and provides sleep medicine services, medication management, and psychotherapy to adults at his private sleep medicine and psychiatry practice.
You should stay up if you can’t sleep by doing a sleep reset. A sleep reset is when you get out of bed and do a relaxing activity until you feel sleepy. You then get back into bed to let yourself to fall asleep again. If you still struggle to sleep, do another sleep reset.
You can do a sleep reset if you can’t sleep at the start of the night, when you wake up in the middle of the night, or if you wake up too early. More on why sleep resets work soon.
Here’s how to do a sleep reset:
RISE can send you a silent reminder to do a sleep reset and guide you through the steps if you reach for your phone at night.
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If you have chronic difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking up too early, sleep restriction therapy is one possible treatment. This involves temporarily staying up later or waking up earlier to reduce your time in bed.
Sleep restriction can increase your sleep pressure (the urge to sleep), decrease arousal, and keep the timing of your sleep more consistent, resulting in higher sleep efficiency (more time asleep when in bed). You then slowly increase your time in bed, hopefully increasing your time asleep, and continuous time asleep, with it.
This treatment may be suitable when your sleep efficiency is less than 85%, or less than 80% for older adults. Sleep efficiency is measured by dividing total sleep time by time in bed.
To determine your reduced time in bed, you take your average sleep times over the last two weeks (keep a sleep diary or check RISE for more accurate data) and limit yourself to this amount of time in bed.
For example, if you have trouble falling asleep (sleep onset insomnia) or staying asleep (sleep maintenance insomnia), you’d typically stay up later than usual. If you average, say, nine hours in bed, but only get six hours of sleep, you’d reduce your time in bed to six hours, set a wake-up time, and count back to find your new bedtime.
You wouldn’t usually spend less than five hours in bed, though, even if you get less sleep than this.
On this new sleep schedule, you work out your sleep efficiency. When you have high sleep efficiency (85% or higher) over the course of a week, you slightly increase your time in bed. If your sleep efficiency is less than 80%, you cut your time in bed further.
If this sounds tricky to get right, that’s because it is! Sleep restriction should only be done under the guidance of a healthcare provider (a cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, CBT-I, practitioner) or a CBT-I app. That way, you’ll get a precise protocol tailored to your specific sleep issues and health status, and professional oversight to ensure it’s done safely and effectively.
Heads-up: If you need to be vigilant at work to avoid accidents (maybe you’re a surgeon or truck driver), sleep restriction might not be for you. But you’ll probably have a lot of daytime sleepiness from insomnia anyway, so taking time off work to try the treatment may be needed, if possible. Speak to your healthcare provider to get personalized advice.
Sleep restriction therapy is often done as part of CBT-I, but it can also be a standalone treatment. Research suggests it’s effective as a standalone treatment in the short term, but more research is needed to see if sleep restriction is effective by itself in the long run.
Sleep restriction may help a few different types of insomnia:
There’s some debate over whether sleep restriction helps if you have paradoxical insomnia, which is when you think you’re getting less sleep than you are. Your sleep efficiency may be normal, so staying up in the form of sleep restriction may not be useful. However, it can still help, says Dr. Wu, because sleep restriction, by limiting time in bed and increasing sleep drive, “may not provide someone the opportunity to think they’re awake when they’re actually asleep.”
It’s not better to lay in bed if you can’t sleep as you may be less likely to fall asleep, both tonight and in the future.
Lying awake in bed is anxiety-inducing — especially if you’re constantly peaking at the time — and this anxiety can make it harder to drift off. You also want to avoid sleep effort, when you try to control and force sleep. Sleep effort can exacerbates and perpetuate insomnia, so the more you try to force sleep, the less likely you are to achieve it.
Getting out of bed when you can’t sleep can take your mind off sleep problems to help you avoid anxiety and sleep effort, so you’re more likely to start feeling sleepy.
If lying awake in bed is a regular occurrence, this can lead to conditioned arousal, when your body associates your bed with wakefulness. Your bed and bedroom can become cues for stress and frustration, which can make it harder to fall asleep.
To help your brain associate your bed with sleep, and weaken the association between your bed and wakefulness, you can practice stimulus control, which includes doing sleep resets.
This involves:
So, as difficult as it is to leave your cozy bed, it’s better to get out of bed and go to a different room when you’re having trouble sleeping. Do something relaxing and distracting, and only get back into bed when you feel sleepy.
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You shouldn’t voluntarily pull an all-nighter if you can’t sleep. Not getting enough sleep can lead to low energy, poor mood, trouble concentrating, and physical and mental health problems like obesity and depression, so you don’t want to give up on sleep altogether.
But don’t just lay in bed getting frustrated. Keep doing sleep resets and only going back to bed when sleepy. If you don’t feel sleepy, keep doing your relaxing activity with the lights low.
We dive more into this idea of whether it’s better to get a little bit of sleep or none here.
Expert tip: If you’re not doing sleep restriction, catch up on lost sleep when you can. Check RISE to see how much sleep debt you have (this is the sleep you owe your body) and pay it back by taking naps, heading to bed a little earlier, and sleeping in a little later. If you regularly have sleepless nights, you might want to avoid naps, however.
We’ve covered how to catch up on sleep here.
RISE works out your sleep debt based on how much sleep you need — also known as your sleep need. This number is different for everyone. When we looked at 1.95 million RISE users aged 24 and older, we found it ranged from five hours to 11 hours 30 minutes.
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If you regularly can’t sleep, take a look at your sleep hygiene. This is the set of daily habits that help or hurt your sleep.
Follow these good sleep habits to have an easier time falling asleep:
To nail your sleep hygiene, RISE can tell you the best time to do 20+ habits based on your body clock to make them even more effective.
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You should also think about your circadian rhythm, which is the internal clock that dictates your sleep-wake cycle. If you go to bed out of sync with your circadian rhythm, you may struggle to sleep, even if you feel tired.
This can happen if you:
Keep a regular sleep schedule and check RISE to see when your body is more primed to fall asleep.
RISE users say the app helps them get better sleep overall.
“I’m sleeping better regardless of time asleep (we all know life happens) because RISE will give me notifications about when to stop drinking coffee and alcohol, and when my ideal time to go to bed is.” Read the review.
Everyone has trouble sleeping now and again, so don’t panic if you can’t sleep one night. But if it’s a regular occurrence — or it takes you a few sleep resets to drift off — inspect your sleep hygiene and circadian rhythm.
If you still get a lack of sleep, get medical advice. A healthcare provider can check for underlying medical conditions or sleep disorders, like sleep apnea or insomnia. If you’re diagnosed with the latter, that’s when sleep restriction therapy may help.
You should stay up if you can’t sleep, but that doesn’t mean giving up on sleep altogether. If you’re still awake after 20 or 30 minutes, do a sleep reset. And if you regularly battle sleeplessness, consider getting CBT-I or sleep restriction guidance.
RISE can help you perfect your sleep hygiene by sending you timed reminders of 20+ daily habits. This’ll help you fall asleep and stay asleep more easily to begin with.
And when you can’t sleep, RISE will guide you through a sleep reset so you stay up the right way and have the best chance of falling asleep soon.
You may get a good night’s sleep sooner than you think — 80% of RISE users get more sleep within five days.
RISE makes it easy to improve your sleep and daily energy to reach your potential
