After a bad night, should you go to bed early?

On Ten Percent Happier (episode 444, May 2022), journalist Diane Macedo, author of The Sleep Fix, told host Dan Harris how years of early-morning and overnight news shifts left her with insomnia. She spent the interview walking through what she learned from researching her own sleep. Two moments from that conversation belong together.

the second your head hits the pillow, you suddenly feel wide awake

Diane Macedo, Ten Percent Happier, 2022

Sleepy on the sofa, wide awake in bed

Macedo described a familiar evening. You're on the sofa, eyelids heavy, head drooping, so you go to bed, and the moment you lie down your brain starts replaying an awkward conversation from years ago. Her explanation: the brain learns patterns. The way you might start to feel hungry walking into a favorite restaurant, enough nights lying awake and frustrated in bed teach the brain that bed is a place to be alert. Clinicians call it conditioned arousal.

Then she explained why the obvious fix makes it worse. She pictures sleep as a seesaw. On one side is sleep drive, which builds the longer you're awake. On the other is the wake drive, powered by your body clock and by stress, including stress about sleep. After a bad night, most of us try to make up for it by sleeping in, napping or going to bed earlier. Each of those spends sleep drive, so by bedtime you're less sleepy just when you need extra pressure to tip the seesaw.

I like to call this the reverse curfew.

Diane Macedo, Ten Percent Happier, 2022

Her version: choose a time a little later than your usual bedtime, and don't go to bed before it. Keep your usual wake time, even after a bad night. Challenging yourself to stay up, she says, also takes some pressure off trying to fall asleep, and each night that goes badly builds more sleep drive for the next.

What the guidelines say

Macedo is a journalist describing her own approach, but it lines up with standard advice. The NHS tells people not to nap during the day and not to sleep in after a bad night, and to stick to regular sleeping hours instead. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine's patient guide describes two methods clinicians use: going to bed only when you feel sleepy and leaving the bed if you can't sleep, and limiting time in bed, with fewer naps and no sleeping in. The stricter, clinician-guided versions set firm limits, so if poor sleep has lasted more than about three months, see a doctor rather than designing your own. And if you're very sleepy, don't drive.

How this fits the Better Sleep program

In the 1h Protocol for Better Sleep, the Wired pattern, where your mind switches on at lights-out, starts by easing off the effort. In the part of the program written for that pattern, you look at the well-meant habits that protect your sleep, such as early nights, sleeping in, naps or checking a tracker, and choose up to two to ease off for fourteen nights. The lines that follow match Macedo's advice: go to bed when you're sleepy, not before, keep your get-up time, and after a bad night keep any nap short and early. The first chapter is free: find your sleep pattern.

Source: Ten Percent Happier, 444: How to Sleep Better, Diane Macedo, 2 May 2022 Research: AASM, patient guide to behavioral treatments for chronic insomnia (2021) · NHS, Insomnia (2024)