When Sleep Won't Come: Understanding Insomnia, Stress & Anxiety — And What You Can Do About It
By Sue Wimpenny | The Willows Hypnotherapy
You're exhausted. You've been exhausted for weeks.
But the moment your head hits the pillow, your mind switches on — replaying conversations, running through tomorrow's to-do list, or worrying about things you can't even quite name.
Sound familiar?
You're far from alone. According to The Sleep Charity's 2024 Sleep Manifesto, around 37% of adults in the UK experience insomnia — that's more than a third of the population lying awake when they'd desperately rather be asleep.¹ Research published in BMJ Open (2024) found that roughly 29% of people report insomnia symptoms, yet the vast majority never seek professional help for it.²
The good news? Poor sleep doesn't have to be your new normal. In this post I want to help you understand what's actually going on when sleep won't come — and what can genuinely help.
Two Kinds of Insomnia
Sleep problems tend to fall into two broad categories:
Sleep onset insomnia — difficulty falling asleep
in the first place. You get into bed, and your
mind simply won't switch off.
Sleep maintenance insomnia — you fall asleep, but wake in the early hours and can't get back to sleep. The mind becomes active, thoughts race, and before long you're watching the clock.
Many people experience both at different times. And in most cases, the root cause is the same: a nervous system that hasn't been able to properly wind down.
What Actually Happens When We Sleep?
Understanding what sleep is actually doing helps explain why losing it hits us so hard.
Through the night, we cycle through sleep stages roughly every 90–110 minutes, four to six times before morning.
Broadly, there's lighter sleep, deep restorative sleep (also known as N3), and REM sleep, when most dreaming happens.
Deep sleep, N3, is repair mode: it supports your immune system and is when your brain's waste-clearance system is most active, helping to clear out the by-products of a busy day.³ REM sleep does something different again — it's when you dream, usually around four times a night, even though most of us never remember it.
This is also when the brain processes what happened during the day and takes some of the sting out of the difficult bits.⁴
So when sleep is cut short or broken, that processing doesn't get to finish. You wake up not just tired, but more anxious, more reactive, more easily tipped over — which, unhelpfully, makes the next night even harder.
The Sleep–Stress Cycle Nobody Warns You About
This is where things get important: poor sleep and stress don't just happen at the same time.
They actively drive each other.
When you're stressed or anxious, your brain registers a threat. It responds the way it's always responded to danger — by flooding your system with stress hormones, mainly cortisol and
adrenaline, plus noradrenaline, to keep you alert and ready to act.⁵ That's a brilliant system when the threat is real and short-lived. The trouble is, modern life — work pressure, relationship worries, money, health — rarely lets that alarm switch off. It just keeps topping itself up.
Stay in that state long enough and your whole nervous system starts running on high alert. Which, as you can imagine, is not a great place to fall asleep from.
But it's not only the hormones. There's something else going on too — and it's usually the part people relate to most: worrying about the not sleeping itself.
You know the moment. It's 1am, you're doing the maths on how many hours you've got left. before the alarm, and the panic about not sleeping is suddenly louder than whatever was actually on your mind earlier.
Psychologists have studied this pattern closely — it's a well-established part of how insomnia takes hold, worry about sleep loss becoming a problem in its own right, on top of whatever started it.⁶
The harder you try to force sleep, the further away it gets, because sleep was never something we can will into happening — it has to be allowed.
So you end up with two things working against you at once: the physical alarm bells, and the mental ones. Fix only one, and the other tends to keep the whole thing going.
Poor sleep raises stress hormones. Raised stress hormones make sleep harder. Each broken night leaves you a little more frayed, so ordinary stressors start to feel bigger than they are. Bigger stressors make sleep harder still. Round and round it goes.
Research backs this up — insomnia and anxiety are closely intertwined, each one capable of triggering or worsening the other over time.⁷
The Stress Bucket
One of the most helpful ways I explain this to clients is the stress bucket model — a concept used in solution focused hypnotherapy.
Picture your capacity to cope with stress as a bucket. Every day, things get poured in: the difficult conversation at work, the worry about a family member, the endless to-do list, the scroll through the news at 11pm. Stress, overwhelm, and unprocessed emotion all fill that bucket.
Now, the bucket has a tap — and this is specifically REM sleep. During REM, the brain processes and files away the emotional content of the day, and that's what actually drains the bucket. Things like exercise, time with people we love, laughter and time outdoors are still hugely valuable — but their job is different: they slow down what's pouring in, rather than opening the tap. Managing a stress bucket well means both — reducing the inflow during the day, and protecting the one thing that empties it at night.
But if you're not sleeping well, the tap barely opens. The bucket fills faster than it empties. When it overflows, that's when anxiety takes hold, when mood drops, when small things feel impossible to cope with, when the body starts to feel the strain.
This is why sleep isn't just a symptom of stress and anxiety. It's also a cause of them. Treating one without addressing the other is like mopping the floor without turning off the tap.
Your Body Clock: The Circadian Rhythm
There's another piece worth knowing about: your circadian rhythm — your internal body clock, quietly running in the background over each 24-hour cycle.
It's mostly steered by light. As it gets dark in the evening, your brain releases melatonin — the hormone that makes you feel drowsy — and as daylight returns, that production winds down again so you wake up.⁸ It also has a hand in your temperature, hormones and metabolism through the day.
Mess with that rhythm — late nights on screens, irregular bedtimes, shift work, ongoing stress — and your body clock gets confused. You end up tired at the wrong times and wired at the wrong times too, even when you do finally get into bed.
The circadian rhythm image in this post shows just how much changes across a single day — deepest sleep around 2am, sharpest alertness around 10am, peak physical performance in the late afternoon. Working with that natural rhythm rather than against it is one of the simplest foundations of good sleep.
Common Signs the Sleep–Stress Cycle Is Affecting You
You lie awake with a busy, racing mind
You wake in the early hours and can't settle again
You feel tired but wired — exhausted, yet unable to switch off
You're more irritable, emotional, or reactive than usual
You find it harder to concentrate or remember things
You're relying on alcohol or screens to wind down at night
Bedtime itself feels anxiety-inducing
Any of these sound familiar? They're not signs that something is permanently wrong with you.
They're signs that your nervous system has got stuck in a pattern — and patterns can be changed.
Practical Things That Can Help
These won't resolve long-standing insomnia on their own — sleep hygiene alone has only modest effects as a stand-alone treatment⁹ — but they're a genuine, evidence-based starting point while you decide on anything further:
Keep a consistent sleep schedule, even at weekends, so your circadian rhythm knows what to expect.
Wind down properly for the hour before bed — screens off, no alcohol or caffeine, something genuinely calming instead.
Protect your bedroom as a place for sleep (and, let's be honest, intimacy) — not laptops, emails, TV, or doom-scrolling.
Watch your caffeine cut-off. It has a half-life of five to six hours, so a 4pm coffee can still be half-active in your system at 10pm.¹⁰
How Solution Focused Hypnotherapy Can Help
Lifestyle changes help, but on their own they rarely undo what's become a well-practised pattern — the alarm bells and the worry, feeding each other night after night. Something needs to interrupt both at once.
That's really what solution focused hypnotherapy does. Firstly it educates and provides the why's, the how's& & the strategies. Then it brings the nervous system down out of high alert, using a deeply relaxed, focused state — pretty much the physical opposite of "wired but exhausted." And because you're calm rather than fighting to sleep, it also chips away at that other trap — the trying-too-hard-to-sleep trap — so bedtime can stop feeling like a task to get right, and start feeling like rest again.
I'll be honest with you: hypnotherapy for sleep is still a developing area of research, and it doesn't have the same weight of evidence behind it as some other approaches. What the research does show is that it can help people fall asleep faster, especially alongside relaxation and cognitive techniques.¹¹
That's partly why my approach also draws on ideas from solution focused brief psychotherapy & also from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) — currently the treatment with the strongest evidence behind it, recommended as first-line by bodies including the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.¹² Bringing CBT-I's focus on unhelpful sleep beliefs together with the calming, pattern-changing effects of hypnotherapy gives you a more rounded approach than either on its own.
You Don't Have to Keep Running on Empty
If you've been struggling with sleep for months — or years — it can start to feel like just how things are. It isn't. With the right support, the cycle can be broken.
I work with adults and young people across Huddersfield, West Yorkshire and online throughout the UK.
👉 Book a free Discovery Call — a relaxed, no-pressure chat about whether this could help
You deserve restful nights and calmer days.
References
The Sleep Charity (2024). Sleep Manifesto 2024. thesleepcharity.org.uk
de Lange, M.A., Richmond, R.C., Eastwood, S.V. & Davies, N.M. (2024). Insomnia symptom prevalence in England: a comparison of cross-sectional self-reported data and primary care records in the UK Biobank. BMJ Open, 14(5), e080479. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2023-080479
Miao, A. et al. (2024). Brain clearance is reduced during sleep and anesthesia. Nature Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-024-01638-y
Murkar, A.L.A. & De Koninck, J. (2018). Consolidative mechanisms of emotional processing in REM sleep and PTSD. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 41, 173–184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smrv.2018.03.001
Rupa Health (2025). The Neurobiology of Stress: Cortisol and Beyond — summarising HPA axis research on cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine release during the stress response.
Harvey, A.G. (2002). A cognitive model of insomnia. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 40(8), 869–893. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0005-7967(01)00061-4
Jansson-Fröjmark, M. & Lindblom, K. (2008). A bidirectional relationship between anxiety and depression, and insomnia? A prospective study in the general population. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 64(4), 443–449.
Endocrine regulation of circadian rhythms (2025). npj Biological Timing and Sleep. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44323-025-00024-6
Effects of sleep hygiene education for insomnia: A systematic review and meta-analysis (2025). Sleep Medicine Reviews. (Found sleep hygiene education alone has limited effect on chronic insomnia compared with CBT-I, though it remains a recognised supporting component of treatment)
Sleep Foundation (2025). Caffeine and Sleep Problems. sleepfoundation.org
Chamine, I., Atchley, R. & Oken, B.S. (2018). Hypnosis intervention effects on sleep outcomes: A systematic review. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 14(2), 271–283. (Note: meta-analysis found hypnotherapy significantly shortened sleep onset time compared to no treatment, though results compared to sham/placebo interventions were less conclusive — this remains a developing area of research)
Non-pharmacological treatments for insomnia: a focus on components of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (2024). Also endorsed as first-line treatment by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the British Association for Psychopharmacology.
Sue Wimpenny is a Clinical Hypnotherapist and Solution Focused Practitioner based in Huddersfield, working with clients across West Yorkshire and online. She specialises in sleep difficulties, anxiety, stress, low confidence and related concerns.
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