Sleep Restriction Therapy - Why It Fails & What To Do Instead
If you have insomnia, and also happen to be neurotic, perfectionistic, neurodivergent, or a general overthinker, then there’s a good chance sleep restriction therapy doesn’t work for you. If so, there’s nothing wrong with you. This post breaks down the reasons why sleep restriction fails for some, and what to do instead.
What is Sleep Restriction Therapy?
Sleep Restriction Therapy is a protocol in many mainstream insomnia therapy approaches, particularly cognitive behavioural therapy. It entails limiting the time you spend in bed to the actual time you are spent sleeping for 2-8 weeks. If that is less than 5 hours though, you keep your time in bed to 5-5.5 hours.
The idea? It’s meant to keep your sleep schedule consistent which helps keep sleep drive high (like hunger for sleep), while creating a strong association between your bed and sleep.
Maybe you’ve read the protocol, or even worked with a CBT-I (cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia) therapist. The process sounds daunting at best, torturous at worst, but you’re willing to go through some pain to finally break the insomnia cycle.
If you’ve tried it and it hasn’t worked or are thinking of embarking in the process, read this post first.
The Problem With Sleep Restriction Therapy
While it works for many, there are some fundamental flaws inherent in its design that make it risky for the overly thinky types.
It Can Lead to More Monitoring
When you have insomnia, you’re in a chronic state of hyperarousal, or fight or flight. Your nervous system and brain record it as a threat. So, your system is more on guard, monitoring any subtle cues that it thinks could hamper sleep. Sleep restriction therapy can involve a lot of monitoring. You have to keep a sleep diary, calculate your sleep efficiency, then restrict your sleep to the window you calculated.
It’s so easy for this kind of monitoring and tracking to get hijacked by insomnia, making this a stressful experience that perpetuates hyperarousal. I break down in another post why understanding hyperarousal and how to work with it is the key to insomnia here. Suffice to say, you might just be giving the hyperarousal more fuel to work with.
Even if you decide not to go through the diary and calculations. You figure hey, my sleep sucks, I’ll reduce my window to 5.5 hours. It sounds simple, right? I find it can still easily lead to hyper monitoring. You are stuck awake later than you want to be, all the while monitoring for signs of sleepiness. The catch? Monitoring perpetuates hyperarousal. So, for some it can just keep their system in that fight or flight state longer. Now, not only are you suffering through forced limited sleep, but your system is kept in high gear all the while.
It Is Based On Control
Sleep can’t be forced or controlled. It is passive. If you can’t force sleep, why force these limitations on it? It doesn’t make sense to me. For therapists or coaches who use sleep restriction, they’ll never say it’s about controlling sleep. But, at the end of the day, it’s implied. For me, the philosophy that sleep returns when you learn to let go of control is more logical. As such, there would be no need to enforce this kind of rigidity.
It Gives Insomnia More Power
When you put yourself through something laborious to fix your insomnia, it can make you resent the whole issue even more. Now, not only are you an insomniac, but you have to limit your sleep when you’re already feeling starved of it. When we give up or reduce things that we care about, it gives insomnia more power, and can make our lives feel smaller. This is part of the reason I am such a fan of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy for insomnia. It’s not about constricting your life.
It Isn’t Kind to Yourself
A huge principle of how I work with insomnia, is self-compassion. As a recovered insomniac, I can tell you that I’ve dealt with a lifetime of being hard on myself. That was around way before the insomnia, and continues to exist, although it has softened. You don’t need to be harder on yourself to sleep well again.
It’s not about beating the insomnia into submission. And, that’s what sleep restriction therapy can feel like. If you’re working on treating yourself with more kindness and gentleness, then sleep restriction can feel like the opposite.
It Can Create More Pressure
When you restrict your sleep, it can feel even more stressful when you don’t fall asleep easily. Now, not only are you staring at a wall when you’d rather be dreaming - you’re thinking of how much less time you have to sleep compared to before. This naturally puts more pressure on yourself to sleep, which we know can drive up the hyperarousal, aka fight or flight response again.
It Doesn’t Recognize the Power of Exposure
Sleep restriction tries to short-circuit insomnia by using extreme tiredness to bypass your anxiety. But forced exhaustion isn't the same as true emotional exposure. True exposure isn't about trapping yourself in a tight sleep window—it’s about learning to sit with the experience of wakefulness without panicking or running away from it. By trying to restrict your way around wakefulness, SRT misses the opportunity to teach your brain that being awake in bed is actually safe.
What Do I Do Instead?
If this is all resonating but you’re wondering where to go next, here is how to get started.
The Timeless Sleep Window
I first learned this from physician turned sleep expert, Daniel Erichsen. It goes as follows: instead of restricting sleep, pick a time before bed when you stop checking the time but wake up at the same time every morning. This controls for sleep drive, which is like hunger for sleep, and it prevents that monitoring from taking over.
It is a simple behavioural way to invite letting go of control, and reducing pressure. Let’s say you’re usually sleepy by 11 pm, and you wake up around 6. You could stop checking the time around 10:30 pm, and then not check again until the following morning when you wake up.
Ditch the Sleep Hygiene
Feel free to discard any of the sleep hygiene rules that feel cumbersome or annoying. You don’t need to expose yourself to natural light first thing in the morning to recover. You don’t need to avoid TV or your laptop before bed to recover. You don’t need to use your bed just for sleep and intimacy to recover. If you’re looking for a deep dive on this, check out my post on sleep hygiene here.
10% Solutions
The idea of 10% solutions I first discovered from trauma expert, Janina Fisher. And while she didn’t create it for insomnia, I think the principle fits perfectly here. What if you aren’t falling asleep? You can ask yourself: What would make me feel 10% more comfortable or at peace with being awake at night.
If peace feels like a far stretch, ask yourself what might make being awake at night just a little bit more tolerable. It might be as simple as laying in your bed and tuning into the comfort, or it could be watching tv, reading, listening to a podcast, having a snack - anything simple that would provide you a bit of reprieve. This is great first step to befriending wakefulness, which I write more about here.
Exposure Is Necessary
No one wants to hear that being awake at night is crucial for the recovery process. But, hear me out. Instead of forcing yourself to be awake longer through sleep restriction, you can use the bad sleep nights as an opportunity to expose yourself to the fears of not sleeping, in a different way. In fact, it’s necessary.
A big element of most people’s response to fear is avoidance. We all want to run away from the pain - it’s only human. But, that means we don’t actually face the fears. For long-term recovery, you need to learn how to relate to your worries differently. Once that happens, then there’s less fear about being awake at night - it might even feel neutral.
Progress is NOT just about sleeping more
Sleep restriction therapy still places improved sleep as the be all and end all of insomnia recovery. I wish for every insomniac on the planet to sleep well again. But, part of realizing that sleep is passive and can’t be controlled means we have to stop chasing it. What’s more, if you get your sleep back quickly but don’t address the root fears, insomnia is likely to make a return appearance.
I actually get more excited when clients aren’t sleeping any better but they feel so much more at ease with being awake at night. This is recovery gold - it means big internal shifts have happened, and it’s only a matter of time before sleep comes back all on its own.
If my words resonate and you're looking for support from someone with both clinical training and lived experience, book a free 20-minute consultation here to see if insomnia coaching with me feels like a good fit.
