A few years ago, I started experiencing fragmented sleep. One of the first things I did was buy a book entitled, Quiet Your Mind and Get to Sleep. It came with a worksheet to help keep track of how much sleep you had, what the circumstances were, etc. I tracked this for 12 weeks or so. It didn’t really help much, until I decided to consult a sleep coach and sent her the worksheets.

While the appointment was relatively uneventful, the sleep coach did notice something when she looked at my worksheets: I often overslept one night, and not enough the next. For example, I’d sleep 9 hours one night, and then 6 hours the night after. After a night of sleeping too much, my sleep drive wasn’t strong enough to get through the following night.

I hadn’t experienced this problem before, and at the time I didn’t set an alarm clock very often.

She suggested a solution could be for me to sleep no more than than 7 to 8 hours. So I made the adjustment: I set an alarm clock that limited me to 7 to 8 hours of sleep, and I’d wake up to that.

Adhering to an alarm clock—combined with a lot of other adjustments—created the conditions for me to sleep a lot better. Whenever I didn’t get a good night’s sleep, I could also tell myself a new story: it was very likely my sleep drive would be stronger, and I could look forward to sleeping very well, the following night.