If you spend your days dragging yourself through a fog of exhaustion, only to find your brain suddenly firing on all cylinders the second your head hits the pillow, you are not alone. The “tired but wired” phenomenon is a modern epidemic. This is a particular aspect of struggling with sleep, and a contributing factor to longer term insomnia. The latter also encompasses fear of not sleeping and negative reinforcement of bed as an unpleasant and awake space. Trauma and neurodiversity also disrupt our pathways to safety, rest and quiet. In this article, though, I will be concentrating on the impact of overstimulation on poor sleep.
(courtesy of chatGPT)
While many of us reach for the sleeping aids when faced with the problem of being unable to quiet our bodies and minds, this is an illusory respite. It ceases instantly when the pills run out and can also reduce our trust in our natural ability to sleep. What we actually need to do is redefine our relationship with sleep, rest and safety and with the human limitations of our bodies and minds. This is not helped by the current trend to treat ourselves like the machines around us, to constantly ‘optimize’ ourselves with the belief that our very humanity can be evaded through measurement, training and supplementation.
Falling asleep, staying asleep, and waking up replenished are deeply tied to our biological perception of safety. When the nervous system is on high alert, the brain actively prevents one from resting. And who isn’t on high alert when bombarded by the gamut of sensory input and demand that our current state of online living creates but for which our brain and nervous systems are not adapted.
The Modern Dilemma: How Being Online Hijacks the Amygdala
One of the primary reasons we are biologically misaligned with the environment around us is the sheer load of modern connectivity. The nervous system was not designed to process hundreds of micro-demands a day. We are designed to be living in caves and moving at the pace of the sun’s arc and the gradual shift in seasons.
Constant online presence, whether directly (as in reading messages or scrolling) or indirectly (just knowing the nearby phone is on and could ping) impacts all aspects of our nervous system and particularly the amygdala. This is a small structure deep within the temporal lobes which acts as the brain’s emotional smoke alarm having evolved to scan the physical environment for predators. Today, we force it to scan a digital horizon of 24/7 news cycles, social media outrage, and urgent emails.
While the brain can distinguish between physical and psychological threats, many of the same neural and physiological stress systems are activated by both. Additionally, our nervous system doesn’t have a million shades of grey and struggles to titrate the life or death urgency evoked by being attacked by a lion and a digital stressor like rolling news stories filled with uncertainty or a late night email. As such, given the volume of online input and demand, the amygdala stays activated and hypervigilant, thus lending itself to finding even more threat in the environment, feeding a vicious cycle of dysregulation.
This chronic tipping of the nervous system towards threat and hypervigilance does two things to disrupt your sleep:
- It overrides the reflective, logical brain: Your prefrontal cortex loses its ability to say, “It’s just an email, you are safe.”
- It inhibits sleep chemistry: An active amygdala signals to the nervous system to pump out cortisol and adrenaline. Elevated stress hormones can interfere with the body’s natural sleep-wake processes and make it harder for melatonin-driven sleepiness to emerge.
As such, you then stay in “fight or flight” mode long after the workday ends. Because you are constantly absorbing new information and anticipating the next ping, your brain never receives the biological “all-clear” signal required to drop your defenses. The result? A brain that literally believes it is too dangerous to close its eyes, leaving you exhausted by cognitive load but far too wired to shut down.
This is even more pronounced in the neurodivergent population, and especially for people with ADHD, whose nervous systems have the tendency to oscillate between over and under stimulation, leaving an exhausted mind still craving more dopamine hits which can be temporarily satisfied by the online world. Similarly, for those people for whom sleep is already disrupted because of the hypervigilant aftermath of trauma, the current norm of overstimulation makes matters considerably worse. The guidelines I have outlined below may help a little for these groups but generally focused therapeutic input is also required to make meaningful change.
Down regulating
Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet that can circumvent the inability of our human biology to accommodate the cognitive and sensory demands that we are confronted with. We may want to be able to be hyper productive and connected and still sleep easily and peacefully but it’s simply not possible without recognising the limitations of what we can manage and working with them. We have to set reasonable boundaries with how much stimulation we allow in, and how fast a pace we demand of ourselves. Or…we have to accept poor and disrupted sleep. It’s not just sleep and rest with which we need to foster a new relationship, it’s also the relationship we have with our humanity.
In order to allow the nervous system to recognise that danger has passed, we need downtime from input and demand. Even apex predators rest after hunting for lunch! Traditionally, sleep literature has focused on winding down effectively before sleep. This is very important but it needs to be supplemented with regular periods of down regulation during the day. This translates as:
The wind-down protocol before bed
Your brain relies on environmental and behavioral cues to know it is safe to shut down. Transitioning from a high-stress, highly connected day to deep sleep requires a dedicated buffer zone. These are some helpful practices to consider in the hours leading up to bed:
| Habit | Timing | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| The Brain Dump | Early evening | Writing down tomorrow’s to-do list clears your working memory before bedtime. |
| Caffeine cut-off | 6 hours before bed | Prevents stimulants from blocking the brain’s natural sleep-inducing chemicals. |
| Screen curfew | 2–3 hours before bed | Lowers visual stimulation and stops the flow of new information, allowing the amygdala to power down and melatonin to rise. |
| Sacred space | Always | Reserving the bed strictly for sleep and intimacy conditions the brain to associate the mattress with rest, not work, digital stress or being awake. |
Restoring our humanity
Our relationship to our humanity has been changing since the dawn of recorded history. People have always tried to overcome human limitations. However, the rate and scope of this has exploded since the digital revolution and indeed in the last decade. We now expect ourselves to function like the machines and software we have built to make our lives easier. The issue is that instead of enjoying the free time and ease that these changes should be creating, we fill the space with more demand, urging ourselves to do and be more. A question we may need to consider is why we feel unable to soften the demands we place on ourselves or why is it so hard to reconnect and allow our humanity. This questioning is at the core of every therapeutic enterprise and can help us unpack the issues with control and perfectionism that may also be keeping us awake.