Not being able to sleep is annoying enough. But if you feel tired and still can’t drift off, it can feel like your body is conspiring against you.
Many things might be stopping you from sleeping, but — luckily — there are science-backed solutions to help.
Below, we’ll dive into the reasons you can’t sleep, despite feeling tired, and what you can do to solve them. Plus, we’ll share how the RISE app can help you fall asleep at your desired bedtime, night after night.
Here are the common reasons you feel tired, but can’t sleep.
Sleep hygiene is the name for the behaviors you can do each day to get a good night’s sleep.
If you’ve got poor sleep hygiene, you may struggle to fall asleep, even when you’re tired. Even worse? You might wake up in the night, too, making it even harder to get enough shut-eye.
Poor sleep hygiene includes:
The fix: RISE can tell you when to do 20+ sleep hygiene habits each day, including when to get and avoid light, and when to avoid caffeine, intense exercise, large meals, and alcohol.
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can click here to set up their 20+ in-app habit notifications.
If you’re tired all day and then wide awake at night, it’s usually because your body clock has gone awry.
This is your circadian rhythm. This internal clock runs on a roughly 24-hour cycle and helps to control your sleep cycle. If you’re out of sync with it, you might find yourself tired, but your body isn’t primed for sleep, so you struggle to drift off.
You might be out of sync with your circadian rhythm if:
The fix: Try to keep a regular sleep schedule, even on your days off. Either honor your chronotype (there’s nothing wrong with being a night owl!) or reset your circadian rhythm and shift it earlier or later to match your lifestyle.
We’ve covered how to reset your circadian rhythm here.
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Your Melatonin Window is what we call the roughly one-hour window of time when your body’s rate of melatonin production is at its highest. Melatonin is the hormone that primes your body for sleep, so you’ll have an easier time drifting off during this window.
If you miss your Melatonin Window and go to bed too late, you may struggle to fall asleep.
And the same thing can happen if you try going to bed too early. You may feel tired (worn out and low on energy), but not sleepy (physically nodding off). If this happens, you’re better off doing a relaxing activity until you feel sleepy enough to crawl into bed.
The fix: Check RISE for the timing of your Melatonin Window each night and aim to go to bed within this window of time. Keep a regular sleep schedule to keep the timing of your Melatonin Window roughly the same each night.
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can click here to set up a reminder to check their Melatonin Window.
Stress and anxiety don’t play nice with sleep. If you’re in a state of stress, you’ll have high levels of the hormone cortisol, which can stop your body from winding down and drifting off.
It’s also easy for our minds to start ruminating (or endlessly worrying) at night. We don’t have any distractions when we’re laying in bed, so we may find ourselves going over the same anxious thoughts.
The fix: Try breathing exercises that have been scientifically proven to lower your stress and help you sleep. These exercises can also provide a distraction to break the rumination cycle.
RISE has in-app audio guides that walk you through exercises like diaphragmatic breathing and progressive muscle relaxation.
Need more advice on calming down? We’ve covered breathing exercises to do before bed here and how to sleep with anxiety here.
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can click here to go to their relaxation audio guide homepage.
While we usually encourage napping, it can be the reason you can’t fall asleep at night. If you nap for too long or too late in the day, you may not have enough sleep pressure — the urge to sleep — to drift off that night.
This can cause sleep deprivation, and then a bigger urge to nap the next day.
The fix: Keep naps short and earlier in the day. The best time to nap is during your afternoon dip in energy. This is far away enough from bedtime to (hopefully) not affect your nighttime sleep, and you’ll be feeling naturally sleepy at this time anyway.
RISE can predict the timing of your circadian rhythm each day, so you can see when this afternoon dip will be.
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can click here to see their upcoming energy peaks and dips on the Energy screen.
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Screens — including your phone, laptop, and TV — emit blue light. And blue light is one of the most disruptive wavelengths of light to your circadian rhythm. It pushes it back and suppresses melatonin production, meaning you may struggle to fall asleep at your usual bedtime.
Beyond light, screens can be disruptive to your sleep if they excite or stress you too much before bed. Consuming exciting or anxiety provoking content before bed (think watching an action movie or reading the news) can energize you rather than calm you down, causing you to miss your Melatonin Window and delay your bedtime. The content you’re consuming on your screens can also cause you to miss your Melatonin due to its bingeable or addictive nature. The same goes for playing multiplayer games online, as it’s hard to pull yourself away if your friends continue playing late into the night.
The fix: Put on blue-light blocking glasses about 90 minutes before bed (we recommend these).
Avoiding electronic devices an hour or so before bed may help, but you don’t have to if you enjoy pre-bed screen time. The research is mixed, but a 2022 study found media use before bed was linked to an earlier bedtime.
And if media use was done in bed and didn’t involve multitasking (so no scrolling on social media with Netflix on in the background), it was linked to more sleep time, too.
Just be sure to consume relaxing content, such as a sitcom you’ve seen before, and consider setting a bedtime alarm or putting your devices on a timer, so you don’t blow past bedtime.
You can learn more about the science of screens before bed here, including how to enjoy them and still feel sleepiness right on cue at bedtime.
It doesn’t matter how sleepy you are, if you’re in pain or discomfort, it’s going to be hard to relax and fall asleep.
And beyond obvious discomfort, you need to make sure your bedroom is a sleep-inducing environment. It shouldn’t be too bright, too noisy, or too warm for sleep.
Temperature is hugely important, yet often overlooked. Your core body temperature needs to drop in order for you to drift off. That means a warm bedroom or thick pajamas could be stopping you from sleeping.
The fix: Audit everything about your sleep set-up — your bedroom, your bed, and your sleep position.
Try:
The reason you’re struggling to sleep isn’t always something you can control. Unfortunately, hormones can wreak havoc with your sleep.
Fluctuating hormones can change your body temperature, anxiety levels, and cause symptoms like hot flashes or night sweats.
The fix: You can’t control your hormones, but you can work to mitigate the sleep issues they cause. Pay extra attention to good sleep hygiene, especially keeping cool and calm before bed.
We’ve covered advice for common times of life when hormones are their most disruptive, including:
Sometimes, a sleep disorder may be behind your trouble sleeping.
This includes:
The fix: Talk to your healthcare provider or to a sleep specialist. They’ll be able to test you for sleep disorders and recommend the best treatments, which could be medication, lifestyle changes, a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine, or cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I).
Beyond sleep problems, health issues and medical conditions could be causing sleeplessness.
These include:
The fix: Talk to your healthcare provider if you think a health condition is behind your sleepless nights. They can recommend treatments and medications to help.
Paying extra attention to your sleep hygiene can make sure nothing else keeps you awake.
In the short term, yes. After 20 minutes or so of trying to sleep, do a sleep reset. This involves getting out of bed and doing a relaxing activity until you feel sleepy again. Try reading, journaling, or doing gentle yoga.
This will stop your brain from making the link between being awake and being in bed, also known as stimulus control. It should also provide a distraction, so you don’t get stressed about not being able to sleep. Dr. Jade Wu, a Board-certified behavioral sleep medicine specialist and researcher at Duke University School of Medicine and author of Hello Sleep, a helpful new (2023) book on overcoming insomnia without medication, advises thinking of this time as bonus me-time and enjoying it, knowing that sleep is coming.
Staying awake if you can’t sleep can also be, perhaps surprisingly, an effective treatment for insomnia. This is called sleep restriction, when you intentionally get less sleep for a set period, which can lead to feeling sleepier at night in the long term. You should only attempt sleep restriction with the help of a cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) therapist or app.
While staying awake can be useful in the short term, in the long term, you shouldn’t just stay awake if you can’t sleep. Sleep is vital for health, energy, and productivity. If you don’t get the sleep you need (known as your sleep need), you’ll build up sleep debt (a measure of how much sleep you owe your body). And this will lead to adverse health outcomes, poor mood, and low energy.
Expert tip: When you’re out of bed, keep the lights low and avoid looking at the time. You want to create a relaxing sleep environment, and bright lights and stressful clock-watching won’t help you feel sleepy.
RISE can work out your unique sleep need and whether you’re carrying any sleep debt.
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can click here to view their sleep need and here to view their sleep debt.
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The ultimate goal is to feel sleepy at bedtime and drift off easily when you crawl into bed at night.
While we can’t do much about hormones or health issues, we can control our sleep hygiene. And good sleep hygiene is scientifically proven to help you fall asleep — and stay asleep — each night.
Here’s what to do:
RISE can guide you through 20+ sleep habits each day and tell you the ideal time to do each one to make them more effective.
For the best results, do these sleep tips every day — not just when you’re having trouble falling asleep. This will ensure you’re getting the best night’s sleep possible, keeping your sleep debt low. Then, when a bad night of sleep happens, it won’t be as impactful.
To finish, we turned to a sleep expert. Our medical advisor, Dr. Chester Wu (no relation to Dr. Jade Wu), provides sleep medicine services at his private sleep and psychiatry practice. We asked for his top piece of advice for those times when you feel tired, but just can’t sleep.
“Try being more awake during the day. Bask in the sun, socialize with friends, and do some exercise. This will help regulate your body clock and should help you feel sleepy at nighttime.” Rise Science Medical Reviewer Dr. Chester Wu
Want more advice? We’ve covered what to do when you can’t sleep here, including the many other factors that could be keeping you awake (and their fixes).
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can click here to set up their 20+ in-app habit notifications.
Sleep is essential for health, well-being, focus — just about everything in life. But sometimes our bodies just won’t drift off, no matter how tired we are. To feel sleepy at bedtime, focus on what you can control: sleep hygiene.
This includes keeping a regular sleep pattern, getting bright light first thing, and avoiding light, caffeine, meals, alcohol, and exercise at the right times.
To take the guesswork out of it, the RISE app can tell you when exactly to do 20+ sleep hygiene habits.
All this will help you get the sleep you need, and get it fast — 80% of RISE users got better sleep within five days.
If you can't sleep even though you’re tired, it may be poor sleep hygiene, being out of sync with your body clock, stress, anxiety, naps, screens, hormones, a sleep disorder, or a medical condition.
If you’re tired but not sleepy, it may be poor sleep hygiene, being out of sync with your body clock, stress, anxiety, naps, screens, hormones, a sleep disorder, or a medical condition. It may also be because you’re trying to sleep before your Melatonin Window, the one-hour window of time when your body’s rate of the sleep hormone melatonin is at its highest.
If you’re tired all day and then wide awake at night, it may be poor sleep hygiene, being out of sync with your body clock, stress, anxiety, naps, screens, hormones, a sleep disorder, or a medical condition.
Anxiety often makes it hard to sleep. If you’re tired but can’t sleep because of anxiety, try doing breathing and relaxation techniques, like diaphragmatic breathing and progressive muscle relaxation, journaling, and having a calming bedtime routine.
If you’re tired but can’t sleep, try doing a sleep reset. Get out of bed and do something relaxing, like reading or journaling, until you feel sleepy. Make sure you keep the lights low and avoid looking at the time, both of which can wake you up.
If you lay in bed for hours and can’t sleep, you may have insomnia. This can be caused by anxiety, stress, depression, and poor sleep hygiene.
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RISE makes it easy to improve your sleep and daily energy to reach your potential
RISE makes it easy to improve your sleep and daily energy to reach your potential
