If you’re lying in bed wide awake with nothing to do, the best move is surprisingly simple: get up. Staying in bed while bored and restless trains your brain to associate the bed with wakefulness, making the problem worse over time. The goal is to do something calm and low-key in dim lighting until you genuinely feel sleepy, then go back to bed.
Here’s how to make the most of that wakeful stretch without sabotaging your chances of falling asleep.
Why Getting Out of Bed Actually Helps
Sleep therapists use a technique called stimulus control, and it’s one of the most effective tools for chronic sleeplessness. The idea is straightforward: your bed should be a cue for sleep, not a cue for lying there frustrated and scrolling your phone. When you can’t fall asleep (or you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep), you get out of bed and only return when you feel genuinely drowsy again.
This feels counterintuitive. You’re tired, it’s 2 a.m., and the last thing you want to do is leave the warm covers. But every minute you spend in bed awake and bored strengthens the mental link between your bed and wakefulness. Over days and weeks, that association becomes the problem itself. Getting up breaks the cycle.
Keep the Lights Low
Whatever you do while you’re up, lighting matters more than you’d think. Blue-spectrum light, the kind that comes from overhead LEDs, phone screens, and laptops, suppresses your body’s production of melatonin. In one study, melatonin levels under blue light dropped to 7.5 pg/mL while levels under red light climbed to 26 pg/mL after just two hours. That’s a massive difference in the hormone that signals your brain it’s time to sleep.
The practical takeaway: use the dimmest, warmest light you can. A small lamp with a warm-white bulb (2,700 to 3,000 K color temperature) at low brightness will let you see what you’re doing without flooding your eyes with the wavelengths that keep you alert. If you need a number, sleep researchers recommend keeping light below 10 melanopic lux at eye level during nighttime hours. That’s roughly the brightness of a single candle across a room. Avoid turning on bathroom vanity lights or kitchen overheads if you can.
Quiet Activities That Won’t Wire You Up
The sweet spot is something engaging enough to relieve boredom but too boring to keep you alert. A few options that work well in dim light:
- Read a familiar or mildly interesting book. Physical books are ideal. Avoid anything gripping or suspenseful. A magazine, a poetry collection, or a book you’ve already read once is perfect. Reading in a calm, low-stimulation way signals to your body that the day is done.
- Sketch, doodle, or color. Repetitive, low-stakes creative activities occupy your hands and your mind without raising your heart rate. A coloring book and a few colored pencils by the couch is a solid middle-of-the-night setup.
- Work a puzzle. Jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, or sudoku in a paper book all give your brain just enough to chew on. The key is choosing something that doesn’t frustrate you.
- Knit, crochet, or do a simple craft. The repetitive hand motions are naturally calming.
- Write by hand. Journaling, writing a letter, or even making a to-do list for tomorrow can quiet a busy mind. Keep it light. This isn’t the time to process your deepest anxieties.
If you absolutely must use a screen, switch it to its warmest night mode, drop the brightness as low as it goes, and choose something passive and unstimulating. A familiar TV show you’ve seen ten times on the lowest comfortable volume is far less activating than scrolling social media, which is engineered to keep you alert.
Gentle Stretching and Physical Relaxation
Your body may be holding tension you’re not aware of, especially if you’ve been lying in bed for a while feeling restless. Simple yoga poses like child’s pose or cat-cow can release that tightness without raising your energy level. Slow, deliberate stretching in dim light is one of the most reliable ways to shift your nervous system toward relaxation.
Progressive muscle relaxation works on a similar principle. Start at your toes: tense the muscles for five seconds, then release. Move up through your calves, thighs, abdomen, hands, arms, shoulders, and face. By the time you reach the top of your head, your body often feels noticeably heavier and more ready for sleep. You can do this sitting in a chair or lying on the couch.
A warm bath or shower is another option if you’re up for it. The drop in body temperature after you get out mimics the natural cooling your body does as it falls asleep, which can trigger genuine drowsiness.
Mental Tricks to Quiet a Racing Mind
Boredom and sleeplessness often come as a package deal with a busy brain. If your thoughts keep looping, there are a few techniques worth trying.
Cognitive shuffling is a method developed by a Canadian researcher that works by giving your brain just enough randomness to prevent coherent thought. Pick any word at random, like “piano.” For the first letter, P, think of as many words starting with P as you can, spending about five seconds on each one and visualizing each one: pear, parachute, pirouette, penguin. Then move to the next letter, I: igloo, intention, island. The random images prevent your mind from latching onto any meaningful train of thought, which is exactly the mental state that precedes sleep.
Another approach that sounds strange but has real evidence behind it: try to stay awake. This is called paradoxical intention. Instead of pressuring yourself to fall asleep, you lie quietly with your eyes open and gently challenge yourself not to sleep. Research in the Journal of Sleep Research found that this technique significantly reduces sleep-related performance anxiety, which is the very tension that keeps many people awake. When you stop trying to force sleep, sleep often arrives on its own.
Rest Without Sleeping
If sleep feels impossible, you can still give your brain and body genuine rest. Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR) is a practice that involves lying down with your eyes closed and following a guided breathing and visualization exercise. It works by dialing down your stress response and activating your body’s rest-and-digest system. Yoga nidra, sometimes called yogic sleep, is one version of this. Sessions typically run 10 to 30 minutes, and free audio guides are widely available on YouTube and meditation apps.
You won’t be asleep during NSDR, and that’s the point. It’s a way to get restorative benefit from the time you’re spending awake rather than lying there feeling frustrated about not sleeping. Many people find they drift off partway through, but even if you don’t, you’ll feel more rested than you would staring at the ceiling.
A Small Snack Can Help
If you’ve been awake for a while and your stomach is rumbling, a light snack can actually support sleep rather than disrupt it. The best options contain tryptophan, a building block your body uses to produce sleep-promoting chemicals. Cherries and pistachios both contain small amounts of tryptophan and natural melatonin. A small bowl of whole-grain cereal, a banana, or a handful of nuts are all reasonable choices.
Avoid anything heavy, sugary, or high in fat, which can cause blood sugar spikes and digestive discomfort. The goal is just enough food to keep your blood sugar stable without waking up your metabolism. High-fiber options like a small serving of popcorn or raw fruit work well for this.
Why Tonight’s Wakefulness Helps Tomorrow
Here’s the one genuinely comforting piece of biology about a bad night: every hour you spend awake builds something called sleep pressure. Your brain measures how long you’ve been awake by tracking a molecule called adenosine, a natural byproduct of cellular activity. The longer you’re awake, the more adenosine accumulates, and the stronger your drive to sleep becomes.
This means that even a terrible night sets you up for a better one tomorrow. The worst thing you can do is try to compensate by sleeping in late or napping for hours the next day, because that burns off the adenosine you’ve built up and resets the cycle. Instead, get up at your normal time, stay reasonably active during the day, and let that accumulated sleep pressure do its job when bedtime comes around again.