PART 2: When Sleep Doesn't Come

Written By Shari Dicks

Part 2 of 2

Some nights you do everything right and sleep still doesn't come. Your body is tired, the lights are low, and your mind won't stop. Part 1 was about the daily rhythm that sets you up for good sleep: light in the morning, dimness at night, and a clock that keeps your stress hormones and sleep hormones on time. This part is about the nights when that isn't enough. It's about the nervous system: what actually helps it settle, what quietly works against it, and why rest still counts even when sleep doesn't come.

I've never been a good sleeper. Looking back, I have so many memories of wanting to go to sleep and not being able to, lying awake in my bed with racing thoughts and ruminations, almost on a loop. I've always been a very light sleeper. My nervous system is always prepared to be listening and paying attention. It's not exactly anxiety. It's more like a hypervigilance. It probably is anxiety too.

The strange part is that I can sleep poorly and still feel pretty good during the day. A lot of times when morning comes, I think: hooray, it's daytime. I can get up and get on with my day.

What I've realized is that trying to sleep can be stressful for me because of the story I carry about not being a good sleeper. That matters, because worry about sleep is its own kind of stress, and stress is exactly what keeps the body alert. This is the same loop from Part 1, turned inward. In a 2025 survey by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, 76% of adults said they had lost sleep because of worrying about their sleep. If that's you, you're in good company.

So this post covers what changed my sleep the most, what happens in your body while you sleep, what alcohol and cannabis do to that, and the tools that help a busy mind let go.

What actually changed my sleep

I've tried every sleep hack there is. The biggest changes weren't hacks at all.

Hormone therapy. In perimenopause, I definitely had night sweats. Since I started on HRT, those have stopped, and I've noticed a real difference in my sleep. Hot flashes and night sweats are a common reason women wake up at night in midlife. The Menopause Society's position is that hormone therapy is the most effective treatment for them. The risks depend on the type, the dose, how it's taken, and when it's started, and for most healthy women under 60 or within 10 years of menopause, the benefits outweigh the risks.

Not every provider is trained in menopause care, and not every woman has easy access to one who is. If night sweats are waking you up, that's worth bringing to a provider who knows menopause. You can ask what's causing your night waking, what your options are, including hormone therapy, and what the risks and benefits look like for you.

Getting sober. I'm almost five years sober, and it was a huge game changer for my sleep. I noticed how much better I slept once I stopped drinking. The research on why is coming up below.

What I do during the day. I exercise regularly, and I try to fill my days so that when I get into bed, I'm actually tired. I'm also pretty good about screens now. Maybe that comes with being middle-aged.

My environment. I try to keep my room really dark and really quiet, but I live with animals, kids, and a husband who sometimes gets up super early, so that's tricky. An air purifier doubles as my white noise machine. A sleep mask blocks light. Reading helps soothe my mind. Music doesn't work for me, because I end up focusing on it and ruminating.

I also use mouth tape, and I think it helps me. It's worth knowing the research on it is thin. A 2025 review of 10 studies found little evidence that it helps, and it can be risky for people whose noses are blocked or who might have sleep apnea. If you snore or wake up unrefreshed, that's worth checking with your doctor before you try it.

What happens while you sleep

Knowing what your body is doing at night explains a lot: why alcohol affects sleep the way it does, why some naps leave you groggy, and why a rough night isn't the end of the world.

Sleep isn't one long state. You move through cycles of lighter and deeper sleep several times a night, and your first dreaming stage usually starts about 90 minutes after you fall asleep. Each cycle has stages:

  • N1 is the doze. You're drifting off and easy to wake.

  • N2 is light but real sleep. You spend more of the night here than in any other stage.

  • N3 is deep sleep, the kind you need to feel refreshed in the morning. There's more of it in the first half of the night.

  • REM stands for rapid eye movement. It's when most dreaming happens, and the REM periods get longer in the second half of the night.

REM matters for mood. During REM sleep, the brain's stress chemistry drops way down. Researchers think that lets your brain process the day's emotional experiences in a calmer state. In one study, people who slept between two viewings of upsetting images reacted much less strongly the second time, and the emotional center of their brain was calmer, compared with people who stayed awake. When REM is cut short, that overnight emotional processing gets cut short too.

A note on naps. I'm not a napper. If I take a nap, it usually means I'm sick. But if naps work for you, length matters. Guidance from the CDC's workplace health researchers is to wake up at about 20 minutes, before you sink into deep sleep, or at about 90 minutes, at the end of a full cycle. Waking up about an hour in, out of deep sleep, is what leaves you groggy. A short nap of under 20 minutes can boost alertness without making it harder to sleep that night. If you can't nap either, there's another option later in this post.

Alcohol, cannabis, and REM

A lot of people use a drink or cannabis to wind down at night. It's worth knowing what each one actually does to the stages above.

Alcohol. For a while, alcohol was one of my sleep tools. It helped me fall asleep. It did not improve my sleep. The research matches that. A 2025 review of 27 sleep-lab studies found that alcohol delays REM and cuts it short, starting at about two standard drinks and getting worse with more. Alcohol only helped people fall asleep faster at about five drinks, and at that amount it disrupts REM even more. This is part of why sleep after drinking can feel restless later in the night.

That isn't a rule. It's useful information. If sleep is hard for you, it's worth noticing how you sleep on nights with a drink and nights without one.

Cannabis. The research here is less clear. A 2025 review of sleep-lab studies found that cannabis didn't consistently change how long people slept, how fast they fell asleep, or their sleep stages. Older studies suggested it cut REM sleep, but those were small and used high doses. The finding that held up was about stopping. When people who used cannabis regularly stopped, they consistently slept less, took longer to fall asleep, and had a rebound of REM sleep, which can mean vivid dreams. If you're cutting back and your sleep gets rough for a while, that's a known part of the process, and it's worth talking through with your doctor.

Rest still counts

Waking up and thinking "I slept like crap" can set you on such a negative path. I slept like crap, so I'm going to feel terrible all day, so I'm going to have a bad day.

Now I have something else. If I didn't get the sleep I wanted, before I get out of bed, I do 10, 20, or 30 minutes of yoga nidra. It calms my nervous system, and I get out of bed thinking: everything's going to be okay.

What yoga nidra is. Yoga nidra is a guided practice you do lying down. A voice walks you through relaxing your body piece by piece and paying attention to your breath, so you settle into deep rest while staying awake. Huberman calls this kind of practice non-sleep deep rest, or NSDR.

In place of a nap. I use yoga nidra in the afternoon too. That afternoon energy dip is normal. Your body clock naturally dips in the early afternoon, while the sleep pressure that's been building since you woke up keeps growing. When I'm fighting that crash, instead of reaching for another cup of coffee, which could affect my sleep that night, I do a yoga nidra. I come out of it feeling energized and refreshed to go about my day.

The research is promising, and it's still early. A 2025 review of randomized trials found that most of them reported people falling asleep faster, sleeping longer, and sleeping more efficiently after practicing yoga nidra. The trials were small, though, and another 2025 review noted that the number of strong studies is still limited. The honest version is that yoga nidra is high-quality rest, not a replacement for sleep. It's low-risk and worth trying, especially on the mornings after a bad night or in the afternoon slump.

Rest is still nourishing. A friend of mine had a bad night's sleep and then had to get on a plane. I told her: just remember that rest is still nourishing. Even if you don't fall asleep, you're still resting. Whatever the psychological effect is, it's going to be okay.

Why I don't wear a sleep tracker. My friend and I also talked about why neither of us wears an Apple Watch or any other sleep tracker to bed. If you wake up and a device tells you that you slept badly, that can shape your whole day. Even if I felt like I slept well, my watch says I didn't, so I didn't, and now I'm going to have a bad day.

There's a name for the extreme version of this: orthosomnia. Sleep researchers coined it in 2017 to describe people so focused on getting perfect sleep scores that the anxiety made their sleep worse. Trackers help some people pay closer attention to their sleep habits. But consumer trackers aren't perfectly accurate, and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's own advice is that if your tracker is making you lose sleep, it's okay to put it away.

Something you know by heart

This one was inspired by my grandfather, who is 93. He told me that when he can't fall asleep, he recites all the presidents, from the current one back to the first. If he gets all the way to the beginning, he goes forward again. He says he's almost always asleep before he finishes.

I don't know all the presidents, so I can't do that. I tried to think of something I had memorized and would always remember. For me, that's the Our Father and the Hail Mary. They don't hold religious meaning for me now, but I can recite them without thinking, and I found it puts me in almost a trance. There's something about reciting that turns off the chatter and the rumination. It feels like your brain can't do both at once. I fall asleep, and that does not happen easily for me. I've shared it with friends and family, and it's helped them too.

The research backs up more than the trance. In a 2001 study in the BMJ, researchers had 23 adults recite the Hail Mary and a yoga mantra. Both slowed people's breathing to about six breaths a minute. At that pace, heart rhythms linked to a calm nervous system got stronger. The effect came from the rhythm, not the religion: the prayer and the mantra did the same thing.

The practice works with anything you know by heart. Your grandfather's presidents, a prayer, a poem, the words to a song you've sung a thousand times. What matters is that it's familiar, steady, and repeated.

The tools I made

This is why I started making mantra videos, bedtime stories, and yoga nidra recordings for my YouTube channel, Shari Dicks – Sixth House Healing. They're part of the rest and sleep videos I call Sixth House Rest, and they're for anyone who finds themselves desperate to get out of their head while lying in bed.

I want to offer as many tools as possible, because not everything works for everyone, and different things work for different people. I've really enjoyed making them. They feel almost like gifts. Sleep is so important, and anything I can offer that feels a little medicinal for our stressful lives, I'm happy to make.

One thing at a time

Sleep isn't something you pass or fail. Some nights will be better than others, especially in midlife, especially with a full house. What you can do is give your nervous system more ways to settle.

A few places to start, if you want them:

  • A conversation with a menopause-informed provider, if night sweats or hot flashes are waking you up.

  • Noticing how you sleep on nights with and without a drink.

  • White noise, a sleep mask, and a room as dark as your household allows.

  • Ten to 30 minutes of yoga nidra in bed after a rough night, before you get up.

  • A yoga nidra instead of an afternoon coffee when the energy dip hits.

  • Reminding yourself that rest still counts, even when sleep doesn't come.

  • Putting the sleep tracker away for a while, if it makes you anxious.

  • Reciting something you know by heart when your mind won't stop.

  • Naps of about 20 minutes or a full 90, if naps work for you.

For me, right now, it's yoga nidra on the mornings after a bad night and in the afternoon slump, the Our Father and Hail Marys when my mind is looping, and white noise and a sleep mask every night.

Pick one. What feels easy? What feels accessible? Start with that, and build from there.

Shari Dicks, Sixth House Healing

Sources

Worry about sleep and sleep trackers

Menopause and hormone therapy

Mouth taping

  • Rhee J, Iansavitchene A, Mannala S, Graham ME, Rotenberg B. Breaking social media fads and uncovering the safety and efficacy of mouth taping in patients with mouth breathing, sleep disordered breathing, or obstructive sleep apnea: a systematic review. PLOS ONE, 2025. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12094774/

Sleep stages, REM, naps, and the afternoon dip

Alcohol and cannabis

Yoga nidra

Something you know by heart

Shari Dicks
Previous

PART 1: Sleep, Stress, and Your Body’s Clock
Next

PART 1: GLP-1 Medications — What They Are and What They Actually Do