Dr. Matt Walker

I love that notion of, and people will often say, I just get up, I go to the couch or the sofa, and that's where I'll wake up in the morning.

Also, they'll say, when I travel and I go to a hotel room, I just can sleep fine.

Now, for some people, it's the inverse, but for those people, it's the contextual difference, meaning the change of the environment is so unfamiliar that it has not been bound to the association of wakefulness.

It's related to sleep or at least the opportunity to sleep.

Sometimes, even I've heard from some people, and there's no studies or data on this,

Even turning yourself around now, this is hard if you have a partner in bed, but you just switch top to bottom of the bed and you take your pillow and you pull the duvet all the way down and you put the pillow at the opposite end where your feet used to be and you get into bed.

And even just looking around and sort of having a difference, that alone is so subtle, but it can make a real difference.

So again, just keep these things in mind.

I know it sounds strange, this whole sort of get up, get out of bed, break the associate.

And we'll come onto something.

Well, actually, I'll come onto it now because I think it's one of the unconventional tips and you mentioned it.

A lot of people say to me, that all sounds great.

Science makes sense.

I just don't.

It's dark.

It's kind of cold.

I really don't want to get out of bed.

So give me some alternatives.

I think the single best piece of unconventional sleep advice I can give you is do anything that gets your mind off itself.

The principal reason that if you look at insomnia as a physiological condition or current working model mechanistically of how insomnia plays out is that you are in this state of almost low level anxiety and you are somewhat stressed.