The real reasons you wake up at 3am and why it’s not just insomnia

Even after following every piece of advice on how to sleep better – from avoiding screens before bed and cutting back on caffeine to keeping a regular bedtime – many of us still struggle to fall asleep or stay asleep through the night.

The golden rule of modern sleep advice is something called good sleep hygiene.

This simply means creating the best conditions for rest – having a steady sleep schedule, a calm bedtime routine and a quiet, dark bedroom. It’s about switching off screens, dimming the lights and cutting out distractions to help your body know it’s time to wind down.

The idea is that we need to slow down mentally and physically before we can drift off – but the phones, tablets, TVs and games we use late at night stop that from happening.

And despite our best efforts, many of us still wake up in the early hours, staring at the ceiling, wondering why.

According to Dr Andy Galpin, a sleep expert at Parker University in Texas, there are three often-overlooked reasons that could be quietly sabotaging our sleep – and making that elusive eight hours feel impossible.

‘For years we’ve been trying to get people to care about sleep,’ says Dr Galpin. ‘Now most people do – but the problem is they don’t know how to fix it.

‘There are lots of obvious things that can cause poor sleep, like too much screen time, drinking alcohol or caffeine, or having a noisy bedroom. But there are other triggers people often miss because they’re focused on what their fitness trackers say or on so-called sleep hacks.’

‘But there are other triggers people often miss because they’re too focused on the data configured by their fitness trackers, or the ‘obvious hacks’ that only really help once you’ve mastered the art of down-regulating.’

Here, Dr Galpin breaks down three overlooked factors that could be quietly wrecking your sleep – even when you’ve blocked out the light, drowned out the noise and confronted your stress levels.

1. Tracker-induced insomnia: the battle between deep and REM sleep

According to the National Sleep Foundation, most adults need around seven to nine hours of sleep a night to ward off disease and wake feeling well-rested.

While most trackers – from Apple Watches to Oura Rings – can reliably tell us how long we slept, they also bombard us with sleep scores, based on the time spent in various sleep stages, how often we woke up through the night, and how ‘ready’ we are for the day.

‘The biggest issue we see with trackers is that they’re actually adding to anxiety around sleep, with people obsessing over their scores,’ Dr Galpin explains.

This phenomenon has been dubbed orthosomnia – essentially tracker-induced insomnia.

Because it’s a relatively new term for an emerging trend, there’s no standard definition, but it typically involves an excessive focus on improving sleep data rather than actual rest, perpetuating a cycle of anxiety and poor sleep.

Deep sleep – or slow-wave sleep – is the body’s most restorative stage, playing a crucial role in muscle recovery, immune health and brain function.

During a healthy night’s rest, deep sleep makes up between 10 and 20 per cent of total sleep, followed by REM (rapid eye movement) sleep – where pulse and breathing speed up, and when vivid dreams can occur.

But according to Dr Galpin, the problem with trackers is that they fuel a misconception that deep and REM sleep have the most profound impact on our health, and are therefore the most important stages.

‘Most wearables can’t accurately track these stages – let alone tell us how much time we should be spending in each,’ he explains.

‘So what we see is people getting really worked up about their sleep scores, which either causes anxiety leading to insomnia, or prompts them to start taking supplements, medications and therapies to try and improve those scores.

‘It’s what we call a house of cards: if you knock out one of the cards on the bottom, the whole structure comes falling down. It really is one of the most detrimental things we see.’

Even the ‘gold standard’ test that these trackers are based on – the polysomnography, which requires a person to spend the night in a sleep lab – is only around 80 per cent accurate, he adds.

‘This essentially means even the gold standard is an arbitrary science,’ says Dr Galpin. ‘Not every doctor who uses this test will give you the same sleep score.

‘So if that’s our best tool, and trackers – which can’t measure brainwave activity – are only 80 per cent accurate compared to that, you’re essentially changing your entire lifestyle based on a score that’s only a rough guide.’

And even then, he says, our sleep shouldn’t be the same every night.

‘Your deep and REM sleep shouldn’t be the same every night,’ he explains. ‘Your brain is responding to and processing what happened that day.

‘If you sat watching TV all day, you don’t need the same sleep architecture as if you ran two marathons, had seven meetings and wrote a book.

‘So when you look at your tracker and see your deep sleep is down, that’s probably a good thing – it means your brain is de-prioritising deep sleep and prioritising what you need most.’

2. The search for novelty: why blue light isn’t always the villain

While it’s often true that using phones before bed can cost around an hour of sleep each week, Dr Galpin says the real culprit isn’t the blue light itself.

The blue wavelengths emitted from screens signal the brain to stop producing melatonin, the hormone that controls how and when we sleep – and so are widely thought to make us more alert and less sleepy.

But, he says, light isn’t the only problem.

‘Screen time isn’t necessarily hurting your sleep because of the light,’ he explains. ‘It’s typically two other things.

‘One is the search for novelty, which arouses your brain, increases your heart rate, and puts you into sympathetic drive – or ‘fight or flight’ mode.’

This can result in the classic 2-3am awakening – when you suddenly find yourself wide awake for no apparent reason.

‘A lot of people will say that screens don’t affect them because they have no problem falling asleep after watching TV or endlessly scrolling on their phone,’ says Dr Galpin.

‘But this is probably because they’re really tired. When sleep pressure is high, we fall asleep quickly.

‘But when we don’t take the time to physiologically down-regulate, we inevitably hit a critical threshold – usually three to five hours into sleep.’

That, he explains, is what’s happening ‘behind the scenes’ when people shoot awake in the early hours.

‘If you wind the story backwards, there’s a lack of down-regulation,’ he says. ‘It’s not the light – it’s the arousal.

‘This happens in a lot of people not because of blue light per se, but because before going to bed, they were looking at something engaging – they were searching for novelty, and that search puts you in an aroused state.

‘That’s the real problem with ‘doom-scrolling’ and TV. It’s not the light, it’s the engagement. And reading a really engrossing book can have the same effect.’

3. Sleep procrastination: when ‘me time’ steals your rest

Ironically, even those desperate for sleep can find themselves putting off going to bed.

This is known as sleep procrastination – though it may feel a little different from delaying household chores or work emails, because the trade-off is often something you can justify as ‘self-care’: reading one more chapter, catching up with your partner, or watching a film before bed.

Dr Galpin says: ‘When you have something to do in your bedroom, you’re going to stay up around 45 minutes longer than if you had nothing to do.

‘That has nothing to do with blue light and everything to do with the fact that you procrastinated going to bed.

‘When we remove these distractions, people fall asleep about 45 minutes earlier, which helps them feel more rested and reduces anxiety around sleep.’

Further research is needed to understand sleep procrastination fully, but experts believe it stems from a mix of daytime stress, low self-control at night, and even orthosomnia – the anxiety about getting a good night’s sleep in the first place.

Galpin says: ‘If we can encourage people to start thinking about their sleep and the environmental factors and habits that could be exacerbating sleep problems, by engaging in the wider conversation, it’s a good thing.’