# Trying to sleep is what keeps you awake

> Sleep is one of the few things effort makes worse. How attention, intention and effort keep you awake, and what a sleep story should leave out.

Source: https://dreamsheeps.space/learn/trying-to-sleep
Published: 2026-09-28 · Updated: 2026-10-14

Sleep is one of the few things that effort makes worse.

Colin Espie's account of how insomnia establishes itself runs in three steps: attention, intention, effort. You begin noticing sleep-related things — the clock, how awake you feel, whether tonight will be another one. Noticing becomes intending: tonight I will sleep. Intending becomes effort: actively trying to produce it.

And sleep is automatic. It is inhibited by being produced deliberately, in the way swallowing gets harder the moment you think about it.

> Normal sleep is not something anyone does. It is what happens when nobody is doing anything.

The clinical counter-move is paradoxical intention: lying down and gently trying to stay awake instead. It sounds like a trick and it has held up in a systematic review.

Ours is quieter, and it is mostly a matter of what we leave out. No Sheeps story will tell you that you are getting sleepy, that your eyelids are heavy, that you are drifting down. Every one of those sentences is a reminder that sleep is the point, and being reminded that sleep is the point is what makes it recede.

It is why the player shows time elapsed and never time remaining: a countdown is a deadline. It is why nothing chimes at the end. It is why the app never asks how you slept.

## The longer answer

Two techniques are built on this. [Paradoxical intention](https://dreamsheeps.space/blog/paradoxical-intention) turns the effort around: in bed with the light out, you gently let yourself stay awake. [What to do when you can’t sleep](https://dreamsheeps.space/blog/what-to-do-when-you-cant-sleep) covers the moment lying there has become a struggle, and [racing thoughts at night](https://dreamsheeps.space/racing-thoughts-at-night) the thoughts that get louder the harder you push them away.

## Sources

1. [Espie et al. — The attention–intention–effort pathway](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smrv.2006.03.002)
2. [Jansson-Fröjmark et al. (2022) — Paradoxical intention for insomnia](https://doi.org/10.1111/jsr.13464)

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Sheeps is the iPhone app these articles explain: a new sleep story, written for you, with nothing to follow, read by a calm narrator and thinning out into silence. Sheeps on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6749510901