"Get out of bed when you cannot sleep to retrain your brain When asked what to do when tossing and turning at night, Walker explains a counterintuitive but evidence-based behavioral technique: if you are lying in bed awake for too long, get up and go to a different room. The reason is that "your brain will very quickly associate your bedroom with the place of wakefulness," and you need to break that learned association by "only returning to bed when you are sleepy." He offers a clarifying analogy: "you'd never sit at the dinner table waiting to get hungry, so why would you lie in bed waiting to get sleepy?" Applying this technique rebuilds the brain's conditioned link between the bedroom and sleep rather than anxious wakefulness. Source: Matt Walker, TED, Sleep is your superpower"