Trying is the problem

Sleep belongs to a very small group of things that cannot be achieved by effort. You cannot try to sleep any more than you can try to be hungry or try to be interested in something.

Worse, the trying itself is arousing. Effort raises alertness, which is exactly the wrong direction, so the harder you work at it the further away it moves. Everyone who has had a bad month has felt this and concluded they must be doing it wrong.

Then comes the arithmetic. It is half past one, so that is five and a half hours if I go now. Now it is quarter past two. That calculation is not neutral information. It raises your alertness at the worst possible moment, every single time you do it.