The Frustrating Truth About Getting A Good Night’s Sleep

I woke up this morning with a feeling of gratitude I wasn’t expecting. It wasn’t because I’d discovered a clever sleep hack or finally found the perfect pillow. After decades of living by a schedule that wasn’t mine, I realized I’d woken up on a schedule that belonged to me. No alarm clock, no rushing to meet someone else’s timeline. My body simply decided it was time to wake up.

Sitting with that feeling, I understood it wasn’t really about the alarm clock. It was about finally having a schedule that let my body have a voice. For decades, work dictated when I woke up, when I ate, and when I made it home. I don’t resent those years. They were part of building a career. But this morning made me think about how rarely I’d stopped to consider what my body might have chosen if it had been given more of a vote.

Most people still don’t have that freedom. Their employer, their shift, their commute, their kids, their aging parents, their bills—some combination of all of it decides when the day begins and how much time is left for sleep. And yet, when sleep becomes difficult, the responsibility gets handed right back to the exhausted person, as if the problem were personal failure rather than circumstance.

The advice is familiar: drink less caffeine, put the phone away, buy blackout curtains, build a relaxing bedtime routine, sleep in a cool room, and so on. I’ve tried and recommended many of these things myself because they can help. But that advice quietly assumes the person has control over the life they’re trying to improve. And that assumption leaves a lot of people out.

Sleep doesn’t happen in isolation. We don’t leave the rest of our lives outside the bedroom door. We bring the disagreement with the boss, the appointment we’re dreading, the parent who needs more than we know how to give, and the bill we can’t quite cover. We bring grief, hormonal changes, a body in pain, or a partner whose snoring keeps us awake while they sleep beautifully. Then we expect sleep to arrive because the clock says it’s time.

This is where much of the sleep advice we hear falls short. It treats sleep like a project we can manage if we create the right conditions. Sometimes that works. Other times, the body is responding to something no routine can fix. A cool bedroom can’t resolve grief. Blackout curtains don’t negotiate with menopause. A breathing exercise might calm the body, but it can’t necessarily quiet everything running through your mind. These practices can support sleep, but they can’t command it.

Mornings get the same treatment. Someone is already waking before their body is ready, commuting, rotating shifts, caring for children or parents, and trying to fit the rest of life into whatever time remains. Meanwhile, the wellness world hands them another checklist before breakfast: meditate, journal, exercise, hydrate, and practice gratitude over your cup of green tea while sitting at the perfect angle of sunrise.

None of those practices are bad. I’ve done most of them. The problem starts when the routine adds pressure to a morning that’s already inflexible. When it falls apart, the person rarely questions whether the routine fit their actual life. They question themselves instead. Now they’re tired, rushed, and apparently failing at self-care too. Very restorative.

The longer I’ve paid attention to health, the more I’ve noticed how normal it’s become to override the body. We’re tired, so we push through. We’re overwhelmed, so we add one more obligation and tell ourselves we’ll catch up on the weekend. But the body doesn’t care that the deadline is real or the shift was necessary. It responds to what it actually experiences—interrupted sleep, irregular hours, stress, pain, and too little recovery.

You can work against your biology for years. I know because did it for years. But being capable of pushing through doesn’t mean you’re unaffected by it. Eventually, the body gets a vote, whether you’re ready to hear it or not. Believe me, when the body comes a-callin’, there’s nothing left to do but tend to it. Period.

Recognizing that your life may be affecting your sleep doesn’t automatically solve the problem, but it changes how you look at it. Instead of treating the whole struggle as a discipline failure, it helps to separate what’s imposed, what can be influenced, and what’s optional. Those distinctions matter because they help you recognize where you actually have some control and where you may be expecting too much of yourself.

What Is Imposed?

Some realities are outside your control. Work hours, rotating shifts, a long commute, young children, aging parents, grief, illness, pain, hormonal changes, and financial pressure can all shape when and how you sleep. No amount of willpower or discipline changes the fact that these circumstances exist, and some may be impossible to change in the short term. 

These aren’t excuses. They’re conditions. Naming them doesn’t remove them, but it stops you from adding unnecessary blame on top of an already difficult situation. There’s a real difference between making the best choices you can within hard circumstances and pretending you have full control over them. Sometimes the life you’re required to live is simply asking more of your body than it can comfortably give. Starting from that truth makes more sense than assuming you’ve failed to build the right routine.

What Can Be Influenced?

Limited control isn’t the same as no control. There may be parts of the situation that can shift, even if the bigger picture can’t. Sometimes those changes are surprisingly simple, but we overlook them because we’re so accustomed to the way things have always been.

There were nights I couldn’t fall back asleep because of a snoring partner, so I moved to another bedroom. It wasn’t a dramatic statement about the relationship. I needed sleep, and the current arrangement wasn’t working. I couldn’t control the snoring, but I could stop lying there getting angrier while insisting the only acceptable place to sleep was the bed I’d started in.

That’s what influence often looks like. Not a grand fix, but a practical adjustment that makes life a little more manageable. It might mean making a scheduling preference known even if it can’t happen right away, sharing an evening responsibility instead of carrying it alone, or protecting a day off instead of automatically filling it. “I can’t change everything” and “I can’t influence anything” are not the same sentence, and it’s worth noticing when you’ve quietly started treating them as though they are. And then there are things you can change, like sleeping in another bedroom.

What Is Optional?

Then there are the demands we add ourselves. Extra commitments, favors, late-night projects, and the belief that every open hour should be productive can quietly eat away at whatever recovery time is left. Some of those demands are so familiar that we don’t even question whether they’re necessary anymore.

Even wellness practices can become part of the problem once they start to feel like requirements. A morning routine isn’t restorative if completing it means cutting sleep short. A workout doesn’t automatically help if fitting it in leaves you more depleted. And self-care that starts to feel like a performance review deserves a second look.

There’s also a difference between something being important and something needing to happen right now. The laundry can probably wait until morning. The favor might be kind, but someone else may be able to handle it. The invitation might sound fun, but your body may be asking for a quiet evening instead.

This isn’t about withdrawing from life or using sleep as an excuse to avoid responsibility. It’s about noticing what’s truly necessary, what could be shared, and what you keep adding simply because a capable person is supposed to be able to handle it all. Maybe the answer isn’t another habit. Maybe it’s one less demand.

A More Honest Place to Begin

When you stop assuming every sleep struggle is your fault, you can stop spending so much energy trying to fix yourself and start paying attention to what your body is actually responding to. That is far more useful than wondering why you can’t seem to be disciplined enough to sleep well.

Maybe it’s your schedule, grief, menopause, pain, caregiving, or a life that’s left almost no room for recovery. Maybe one part of it can change and another can’t. The value isn’t necessarily in finding a tidy answer. It’s in seeing your circumstances clearly enough to recognize what might need to change, what deserves attention, and what simply isn’t within your control right now.

It took a health crisis to force me to slow down and pay attention to my body for the first time in decades. That awakening eventually changed far more than my sleep, and it’s part of what I wrote about in my book, The Awakened Body. Learning to listen to the body means paying attention to what it’s telling us, whether that’s a habit worth changing, a signal we’ve been ignoring, or something about the life we’re living that deserves a closer look.

Listening to your body doesn’t guarantee that every circumstance can change. But it can help you recognize when the answer isn’t another checklist, another routine, or another demand on your already crowded day. Sometimes the most meaningful change begins when you finally question what you’ve been asking your body to tolerate.

This is the third article in my ongoing sleep series, where we’re looking beyond bedtime routines to better understand sleep, the body, and the many things that influence how well we rest. If you missed the earlier articles, explore the series to learn more about what happens while you sleep and the everyday factors that can help—or interfere with—getting a good night’s rest. Here are the links to the previous two articles:

Sleep The Ultimate Health Hack This article is also available as an audio so you can listen on the go. Click HERE for the audio version (where I just read the written blog).

Sleep and Weight Loss