A psychotherapist's reflection on sleep, mental load, and the kind of rest we actually need
Today is World Sleep Day, and my social media feed is already full of tips. Keep your bedroom cool. Put your phone down an hour before bed. No caffeine after 2pm. Magnesium. Lavender. White noise.
And look - none of that is wrong. Sleep hygiene matters. But if you are lying awake at 3am with your jaw clenched and your mind cycling through tomorrow's to-do list, a weighted blanket is not going to fix what is actually going on.
So instead of another set of sleep tips, I want to talk about what is underneath the sleeplessness. Because what I tend to see is that poor sleep is almost never just about sleep.
The 3am mind is not broken. It is overloaded.
When clients tell me they cannot sleep, I listen for what comes next. It is rarely "I had too much coffee." It is almost always something like: "I cannot switch off." "My brain will not stop." "I lie there going over things I said, things I need to do, things I have forgotten."
This is not insomnia in the clinical, standalone sense. This is a nervous system that has been running on high alert all day and has not been given permission to stand down. It is mental load that has nowhere to go. It is the emotional residue of carrying too much, for too many people, for too long.
For some of my clients - particularly those who are neurodivergent, or recovering from burnout, or parenting while working plus managing a household and trying to be a good enough version of themselves in every direction - sleep is the first thing that fractures. Not because their sleep is broken, but because their days are too full for their nervous systems to process.
Rest is not the same as sleep
Here is something I wish more people knew: you can get eight hours of sleep and still be profoundly exhausted.
That is because sleep is only one form of rest. If your waking hours are spent in a state of constant output - emotional labour, decision-making, performing competence, managing other people's needs, absorbing sensory input you never asked for - then your body may technically be sleeping, but your nervous system is not recovering.
True rest involves more than unconsciousness. It involves safety. It involves the felt sense that you do not need to be vigilant, productive, or impressive for a while. For many of the people I work with, that kind of rest feels genuinely unfamiliar. Some of them have never had it.
The guilt problem
There is a particular cruelty in the way our culture talks about rest. We frame it as something you earn. "You deserve a break" implies that without earning it, you do not. Rest becomes another thing on the to-do list, another performance metric. Did you rest well enough? Efficiently enough? Did you optimise your recovery?
Many of my clients feel guilty for being tired. They feel guilty for not sleeping well. They feel guilty for needing to rest at all. And that guilt - that persistent, low-level hum of "I should be doing more" - is itself one of the biggest obstacles to actually resting.
If you recognise this, I want to say something clearly: rest is not a reward. It is a biological requirement. You do not need to justify it any more than you need to justify breathing.
What I have learned (the hard way)
I write about this as a psychotherapist, but also as someone who has lived with poor sleep. In my personal experience, sleep is one of the first things to go and one of the slowest to come back. You cannot think your way into better sleep. You cannot discipline yourself into it. What you may need to do is address the daytime conditions that make rest impossible.
This means looking honestly at the mental load you are carrying. It means examining what you are saying yes to and why. It means recognising that an inability to sleep is not a failure of willpower but a signal from a body that is running on fumes.
So what actually helps?
If you are reading this and recognising yourself, here are some things that tend to make a real difference - not just to sleep, but to the broader quality of rest in your life:
Start noticing your nervous system before bedtime, not at bedtime. If you arrive at 10pm still in fight-or-flight mode, no amount of chamomile tea will bridge the gap. Build in small transitions during the evening - a change of clothes, a shift in lighting, a moment outside. These are not luxuries; they are signals to your body that the day is ending.
Audit your mental load honestly. Write it down if it helps. Not to solve everything, but to see it clearly. Sometimes the simple act of externalising what you are carrying reduces the pressure enough for your brain to stop cycling through it at night.
Give yourself permission to not be productive for a portion of every day. This is harder than it sounds, particularly for high-achievers and people-pleasers. But your nervous system needs unscheduled, unoptimised time. Not self-care-as-productivity. Actual, purposeless rest.
And if poor sleep has been going on for a while and these shifts are not enough, please consider talking to someone. A GP, a therapist, someone who can help you look at the bigger picture rather than just the sleep.
A gentle challenge for today
World Sleep Day is a useful prompt, but I would love us to widen the conversation beyond sleep hygiene. The question is not just "how can I sleep better?" The question is "what in my waking life is making rest so difficult?"
You might not be able to answer that fully today. But noticing the question is a start.
And if the answer, when it comes, is "everything" - please know you are not alone in that. And that it does not have to stay that way.
Dr Victoria Froome
Integrative Psychotherapist | Dragonfly Psychotherapy
www.dragonflypsychotherapy.co.uk