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The short answer
Usually yes. If you have been lying awake and you feel wide awake, restless or frustrated, getting up is the advice most sleep clinicians give. Go somewhere dim and calm, do something quiet, and return to bed when you feel sleepy again.
The idea comes from stimulus control, one of the behavioural techniques in the AASM guideline for chronic insomnia. It aims to keep the bed linked with sleep rather than with lying awake.
Why not to watch the clock
You may have heard of the "20-minute rule". It is a rough guide. Checking the clock to see if 20 minutes have passed tends to wake you up further and adds pressure.
Turn the clock to face the wall and keep your phone out of reach. Go by how you feel. If you notice you are alert and getting cross about it, that is your cue.
Where to go and what to do
Pick a spot outside the bedroom if you can, like a chair in the living room. Keep the lights low and the room comfortably warm.
Choose something calm and a little dull:
- reading a paper book or magazine
- listening to quiet music or a familiar podcast
- folding laundry or a simple puzzle
Avoid screens, work, food and anything that gets you thinking hard. The aim is to wait for sleepiness to come back.
When to go back to bed
Head back when your eyelids feel heavy, you start yawning, or you lose your place on the page. Let sleepiness decide when, whatever the clock says.
If you go back and find yourself wide awake again, get up again. Some nights that happens more than once.
What if it happens several times a night?
Early on, it is common to get up two or three times. That is tiring, and it is part of how the bed-sleep link is rebuilt. Many people find the number of trips drops over a couple of weeks of steady practice.
Keep your wake time the same the next morning, however broken the night was. A lie-in tends to make the following night harder. There is more on this in stimulus control explained and waking at 3am.
When getting up is not the right call
Getting up in the dark has risks for some people. If you are unsteady on your feet, have had falls, take medicines that make you drowsy or dizzy, or need to get up carefully for another reason, staying in bed may be safer.
In that case, sit up in bed with a low light and do something calm until you feel sleepy. A GP or practice nurse can help you adapt the approach. If waking like this happens most nights, try our free self-check before your appointment.
FAQ
- How long should you lie in bed if you can't sleep?
- The often-quoted figure is about 20 minutes, but use it as a rough guide. Get up when you notice you are wide awake, restless or frustrated.
- Is it better to rest in bed than get up?
- Resting in bed while calm and drowsy is fine. Lying there wide awake and frustrated, night after night, can teach the brain to link bed with being awake.
- Is the 20-minute rule real?
- It comes from stimulus control, a technique in CBT-I. The point is to leave bed once you are clearly awake, without clock-watching to count the minutes.