How to Get Better Sleep: Why More Hours Isn't the Answer

I used to think sleep was just something that happened to you.

You get in bed, you close your eyes, and either it works or it doesn't.

And if it didn't work, well. That was just how you slept (turns out that's not a personality type, which was a little insulting to find out!).

So I did what you probably do.

I went to bed earlier and lay there longer, I told myself I'd catch up on the weekend, I blamed the baby, I blamed the farm, or the season, and I still got up every morning feeling like I'd been run over by the day before.

Nobody was going to sit me down and explain how to get better sleep. I figured it was lack of hours, and hours were the one thing I did not have to give!

Why You're Still Exhausted After Eight Hours — Your Body Never Actually Powered Down

Here's the thing I didn't know.

Sleep isn't one flat thing you either get or don't.

Your body moves through it in stages.

The deep repair part is the first thing to get skipped when you climb into bed still wired from the day.

Which means you can lie there for eight hours and wake up feeling like you borrowed the rest instead of getting it.

That's why "just go to bed earlier" never did it for me.

I was getting the hours! But I wasn't getting anything out of them.

Broken Sleep and Short Sleep Are Not the Same Problem

Raise your hand if sleep is a struggle.

That was me for a long time.

Couldn't shut my brain off at night.

Couldn't fall back asleep once I was up.

Woke up feeling like I hadn't slept at all.

And almost nobody separates the two problems for you.

Short sleep is not enough hours. You know exactly what's wrong, and you know what would fix it, you just can't get it right now.

Broken sleep is enough hours in pieces. Up at eleven, up at two, up at four-thirty, and your body never gets far enough into the cycle to do its repair work.

Most of us treat the second one like the first. We go to bed an hour earlier and add sixty more minutes of the same interrupted, half-there sleep.

Then we're confused when nothing changes.

(And I'll be honest, my nights don't usually go wrong because the house is too quiet. Mine go wrong because somebody's up at one to check sheep, or I'm lying there convinced a kid is about to get sick. Different problem, same ceiling at two in the morning!)

It Isn't Just About Being Tired

Here's the part I didn't take seriously for way too long.

Sleep isn't only about whether you're dragging tomorrow.

It's your patience with your kids.

It's the quality of the work you do.

It's whether you actually enjoy a day or just get through it!

I was handing all of that away every single night and calling it a busy season.

You Treat Bedtime Like a Finish Line

Be honest with me for a second.

Is the hour after everybody goes down actually rest, or is it just the first hour all day that belongs to you?

Because there's a difference, and I ignored it for YEARS.

For a long time, the moment the kids went down was the moment I finally got to start.

That's when I answered messages.

That's when I did the dishes I'd walked past nine times.

That's when I remembered fourteen things I hadn't done and did four of them standing up.

And then I got in bed at eleven and asked my brain, which had been sprinting since five in the morning, to please stop immediately.

It was never going to stop immediately.

Winding down is a runway, not a light switch, and I wasn't giving myself one single foot of it.

How to Get Better Sleep: What Actually Helped Me

I'd love to tell you I found a perfect nighttime routine and now I sleep like a woman in a mattress commercial, but let's be real.

I have a baby, and somebody in this house is up at 1am checking sheep a lot of times. Some nights are simply going to be what they are (😵‍💫).

What changed was smaller than that.

I stopped taking my pre-workout past early afternoon.

That one was embarrassing to figure out, honestly. I was throwing back a scoop at four to survive chores and then genuinely wondering why I was wide awake at eleven!

And I make a cup of Drift every single night, its a ritual, and it really helps on the nights I can already tell my brain isn't finished with the day.

It's a hot cocoa, which is the whole reason it works for me. It's warm, it takes a few minutes to drink, and it's the thing that tells my body we're done for the day.

It also handles the part where I'm standing in the kitchen at nine looking for chocolate, which was absolutely a nightly event around here!

Drift doesn't sleep for me. It just gives me a way to stop the day on purpose instead of hoping it stops on its own.

Your Turn

I still get this wrong sometimes.

But I've stopped treating it as evidence of something wrong with me.

You're not a bad sleeper, you're an exhausted person who has never once been handed a quiet hour.

Good sleep is worth about a million dollars to me, and the twenty minutes it takes to protect it is the cheapest thing I do all day!

So tell me — what's the thing you always end up doing at eleven at night that could absolutely have waited? What small thing could you easily add into your evening routine to signal to your brain that you're done for the day? I'd love to hear it! 💗

Love,

Breanna