Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
Short sleep is often not a sleep problem at all. It is midnight arriving without being noticed, on top of a day whose work got pushed into the evening.
If that is the shape of it, advice about winding down will keep missing. What tends to help is an alarm for going to bed, the same as the one for getting up, plus doing something about the daytime delay that made the night the only time left. This is worth putting near the top of the list, because lost sleep makes every other part of this harder by morning.
Qur’an and Sunnah
The night as a cover (Quran 78:10). Night is described as something that closes over the day rather than extending it.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review and meta-analysis mapped the correlates of bedtime procrastination, meaning delaying sleep with no outside reason for it, and its link with inadequate sleep. Separately, a review reports delayed sleep phase in roughly three quarters of children and adults with ADHD, and argues that body clock disruption is central rather than incidental. Together they make a fair case for treating bedtime as a question of timing, though neither shows that a bedtime alarm fixes it.
Hill VM, Rebar AL, Ferguson SA, Shriane AE, Vincent GE. (2022). Go to bed! A systematic review and meta-analysis of bedtime procrastination correlates and sleep outcomes.. Sleep medicine reviews doi
Bijlenga D, Vollebregt MA, Kooij JJS, Arns M. (2019). The role of the circadian system in the etiology and pathophysiology of ADHD: time to redefine ADHD?. Attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
If the reason you are still up is that nothing marked the hour, then marking the hour is the intervention.
When not to
If you sleep long hours and still wake unrefreshed, or you snore heavily or stop breathing at night, get that looked at rather than assuming it is only a matter of timing.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
The dreaming is not the problem. It is that bills, forms and renewal dates are dull enough to stop registering at all, and those are the things that actually damage a life.
Keep consequences for the sake of honesty, but let praise and reward do most of the work. Punishment can tell a child what to stop and it cannot tell them what to do instead.
Walking away from a course or a job that was never going to fit can be the sensible move rather than a failure of nerve. It is also frightening, particularly when other people are paying for it.