Why High Achievers Can’t Sleep: The Harder You Try, The Worse It Gets
Feb 06, 2026Want to go deeper?🎙️ Listen to the Journey Mindfulness Podcast — streaming now on YouTube, Spotify, & Apple.
You’re lying in bed. Again.
You’ve tried everything—the meditation apps, the sleep hygiene checklist, the magnesium, the melatonin, the blue-light glasses, the weighted blanket. Your mind doesn’t care. It’s cataloging tomorrow’s meetings, replaying today’s conversations, solving problems you won’t face for weeks. You check the clock: 2:47am. Your chest tightens. “I have to sleep.”
And that’s exactly when it gets worse.
If you’re reading this at 3am on your phone—I see you—you’re not broken. You’re experiencing something I encounter every week in my therapy practice: the high-achiever sleep paradox. The same qualities that make you exceptional at your work—your analytical mind, your relentless problem-solving, your refusal to accept failure—are the very forces sabotaging your sleep.
I want to explain why your brain is doing this, what’s actually happening in your nervous system, and why the approach I teach is fundamentally different from everything you’ve tried. More importantly, I want to introduce you to a principle discovered over a century ago that explains your insomnia better than any modern sleep hack ever could.
Your Greatest Strengths Are Your Sleep’s Worst Enemy
Let me describe someone I know well. You’ve built a career—and maybe a life—on solving problems. When something is broken, you fix it. When a challenge appears, you rise to it. “Try harder” has always worked. You’ve achieved things most people only talk about. And yet here you are, unable to accomplish the one thing that every infant on the planet does effortlessly.
In over twenty years as a therapist, I’ve worked with C-level executives, attorneys, entrepreneurs, physicians, and high-performing professionals who excel at everything they touch—and who feel like complete failures because they can’t “figure out” sleep. The shame runs deep. You don’t talk about it, because admitting you can’t sleep feels like admitting weakness. So you suffer in silence, armored in caffeine by day and researching sleep hacks by night.
Research tells us that 10–30% of the general population experiences insomnia. But among high achievers and perfectionists? The rates climb significantly higher. And here’s what nobody tells you: your problem-solving brain—the one that built your career—is actually creating the problem.
I think of a client I’ll call Nancy. She came to me after nearly two years of worsening insomnia. On paper, Nancy had everything together—a demanding leadership role, a family she was deeply committed to, a reputation for being the person who could handle anything. She’d tried melatonin, then prescription sleep aids, then a sleep clinic, then an app-based CBT program. Each one helped for a week or two before the old pattern returned. By the time she sat down in my office, she was exhausted in a way that went beyond tiredness. “I’ve never failed at anything this badly,” she told me. “I don’t understand why I can’t do the most basic human thing.” What Nancy didn’t realize—and what most high achievers don’t—is that she wasn’t failing. She was succeeding at exactly the wrong strategy.
Insomnia Isn’t a Sleep Problem—It’s an Effort Problem
The harder you try to sleep, the more awake you become. This isn’t a metaphor—it’s neuroscience. And it’s also a principle that was understood long before brain imaging existed.
When you can’t sleep, your brain treats wakefulness as a problem to be solved. It releases adrenaline, activates your sympathetic nervous system—your fight-or-flight response—and increases cortisol production. All of this happens at precisely the time these stress chemicals should be at their lowest. You’re literally flooding your body with arousal hormones while trying to relax. And the harder you fight it, the worse it gets.
Here’s how the cycle works: You can’t sleep, so you identify that as a problem. Your problem-solving brain kicks into gear and releases stress hormones. Those hormones make you more alert. You try harder to override them. That effort creates more arousal. Sleep becomes impossible. Over time, your brain learns a devastating association: bed equals stress, not rest.
People who sleep well never “try” to sleep. They get in bed, their nervous system naturally downregulates, and sleep happens. You? You’re performing. You’re auditioning for sleep every single night—and the performance anxiety is killing the performance.
A coach I work with recently illustrated this in a way that made me laugh—and then made me think. He said, “Try sitting down.” I sat. He said, “No—I didn’t say sit down. I said try to sit down.” And that’s when it clicked. You can’t “try” to sit. You either sit or you don’t. The moment you add “try,” you’ve introduced hesitation, effort, and an implied possibility of failure into something your body already knows how to do. Sleep works the same way. You don’t try to sleep. You sleep. Or you lie there trying—which is an entirely different activity.
A Century-Old Truth Modern Science Is Catching Up To
Over a hundred years ago, a French pharmacist and psychologist named Émile Coué identified this exact phenomenon. He called it the Law of Reversed Effort, and his insight was as elegant as it was counterintuitive: when the will and the imagination are in conflict, the imagination always wins. Not only does it win—the harder the will pushes against it, the stronger the imagination becomes.
Coué used a vivid example that will feel painfully familiar. A person notices they cannot fall asleep. They want to sleep. The harder they try, the less they succeed. The will says, “I must sleep.” The imagination replies, “You’re wide awake, and here’s everything you have to worry about.” The will pushes harder. The imagination pushes back harder still. It’s not a fair fight—and the imagination never loses.
Coué saw this pattern everywhere, not just in sleep. The novice bicyclist sees a stone in the road, imagines hitting it, and despite every effort to steer away—rides directly into it. The person walking across a plank on the ground does so effortlessly. Raise that plank twenty feet in the air, and the same person freezes—not because the task has changed, but because the imagination has taken over.
What Coué understood, and what modern neuroscience now confirms, is that effort itself becomes the obstacle. In his own words: when people fail at autosuggestion—at changing their own internal state—it is almost always because they are “trying too hard.” The solution, he found, was not more effort but less. Not forceful willpower, but gentle, conviction-based allowing. He prescribed that conscious suggestions should be made “naturally, simply, with conviction, and above all without any effort.”
For you, the high achiever lying awake at 2am, this is the fundamental truth hidden inside your insomnia: you are engaged in an internal war that effort cannot win. Every time you try to force yourself to sleep, you are strengthening the very resistance that keeps you awake. Your will says “sleep.” Your imagination says “danger.” And as Coué would tell you—and as you already know in your bones—the imagination is running the show.
Why Your Body Is Wired for Wakefulness
Your autonomic nervous system operates in two fundamental modes. Your sympathetic nervous system is the gas pedal—problem-solving, alertness, survival. Your parasympathetic nervous system is the brake—rest, digestion, repair, sleep. In a balanced system, these shift naturally throughout the day.
But here’s the reality for most high achievers: you’ve spent years—maybe decades—training your gas pedal to be hypersensitive. Pushing through deadlines, managing crises, staying sharp under pressure. Your nervous system learned that activation equals survival. Your brake pedal? It’s atrophied from underuse.
Studies measuring heart rate variability show that chronic insomniacs have significantly reduced vagal tone—the key marker of parasympathetic function. Translation: your nervous system has forgotten how to downshift. Your cortisol pattern tells the same story. In a healthy system, cortisol is high in the morning and gradually declines to its lowest point at night. In people with chronic insomnia, cortisol is elevated specifically during pre-sleep hours—exactly when it should bottom out.
This is why conventional sleep hygiene advice, while well-intentioned, rarely solves the problem. Avoiding screens, keeping your room cool, maintaining a consistent bedtime—these are fine. But they’re addressing the surface while ignoring the depths. You cannot dark-room your way out of a dysregulated nervous system. And you certainly can’t willpower your way through it—because as Coué showed us, effort against the imagination only deepens the conflict.
The Counterintuitive Solution: Stop Trying to Sleep
Here’s what changed everything for my clients—and the research supports it powerfully: the solution to chronic insomnia isn’t a better sleep strategy. It’s a fundamentally different relationship with being awake.
You’ve tried to relax. You’ve done the breathing exercises, the progressive muscle relaxation, the guided meditations. Sometimes they work. More often, they don’t. And the reason is subtle but critical: you’re still trying to produce an outcome. You’re still efforting toward sleep. And that effort—even wrapped in relaxation techniques—activates exactly the arousal that prevents sleep.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR—the program I teach—wasn’t originally designed for sleep. It was developed for chronic stress and pain. But research has shown it to be remarkably effective for insomnia, and the reason goes straight to the heart of Coué’s insight: MBSR addresses the relationship you have with your own wakefulness. It trains you to stop fighting what is.
What the Research Shows
In a landmark randomized controlled trial published in the journal SLEEP, researchers at Rush University Medical Center found that MBSR produced significantly greater reductions in total wake time, pre-sleep arousal, and insomnia severity compared to a control group. Pre-sleep arousal scores dropped by more than seven points—a clinically meaningful reduction in the nighttime mental activation that keeps you staring at the ceiling.
A separate pilot trial at the University of Minnesota compared MBSR directly to pharmacotherapy for chronic insomnia. Both groups showed large, significant improvements on the Insomnia Severity Index, sleep quality, and sleep efficiency. But here’s the crucial difference: MBSR’s effects were sustained at the five-month follow-up, long after the eight-week program had ended. The medication group required ongoing use to maintain benefits. A meta-analysis of MBSR for insomnia confirmed statistically significant improvements in sleep quality, depression, and anxiety across multiple studies.
And in studies specifically examining cognitive arousal—the clinical term for the racing, problem-solving mind that keeps high achievers awake—mindfulness-based approaches have produced some of the largest effect sizes in the insomnia treatment literature, with early studies reporting Cohen’s d values above 1.0 for reductions in nocturnal cognitive arousal.
Where CBT-I Fits—And Where It Falls Short
If you’ve researched insomnia treatment, you’ve almost certainly encountered CBT-I—Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia. It’s considered the gold standard, and for good reason. CBT-I uses techniques like stimulus control, sleep restriction, and cognitive restructuring to break the behavioral and thought patterns that perpetuate insomnia. The research behind it is strong, and I incorporate several of its behavioral components in my own work.
But here’s what I’ve observed in over two decades of practice: CBT-I works beautifully for many people, yet a significant number of high achievers struggle with it—or find that improvements plateau. The reason goes back to Coué’s insight. CBT-I still relies heavily on cognitive effort. It asks you to identify and challenge distorted thoughts about sleep, to restructure your thinking, to apply techniques with discipline. For someone whose nervous system is already locked in an efforting pattern, this can inadvertently reinforce the very dynamic that’s causing the problem. You end up “trying hard” at CBT-I the same way you were trying hard at sleep.
Nancy had exactly this experience. She’d completed an app-based CBT-I program and followed every protocol faithfully. Sleep restriction helped initially, but the cognitive restructuring piece felt like another performance to get right. She found herself lying in bed thinking, “Am I challenging this thought correctly? Is this the right replacement thought?”—which is just another form of efforting. The method was sound. But for her wiring, it wasn’t enough.
This is where MBSR offers something CBT-I alone cannot. Rather than replacing one set of thoughts with another, MBSR changes your relationship to thinking itself. It doesn’t ask you to fix your thoughts—it teaches you to step back from them entirely. For high achievers caught in the effort trap, this shift from doing to being is often the missing piece.
How It Actually Works
Coué taught that the path to change runs through the imagination, not the will—and that suggestions must be made gently, with conviction, and without effort. MBSR operates on the same principle, but through systematic training rather than affirmation alone. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
First, there’s what clinicians call paradoxical intention. Instead of trying to sleep, you practice staying awake with curiosity. You observe the sensations of wakefulness without judgment or resistance. This removes the performance anxiety entirely. It sounds counterintuitive, but it works precisely because it eliminates the effort that Coué identified as the core obstacle.
Second, you learn cognitive defusion—the ability to see thoughts as thoughts, not problems requiring solutions. “I have to sleep or I’ll be exhausted tomorrow” becomes “I’m having the thought that I have to sleep.” This creates space between you and the anxious thinking. You stop being consumed by the story your imagination is telling, without trying to fight it.
Third, through body scan meditation, you develop a refined awareness of physical sensation—tension, restlessness, arousal—without trying to change any of it. This is not relaxation. It’s meta-awareness. And paradoxically, this non-efforting awareness begins to downregulate your nervous system naturally. You’re training your brake pedal—not by forcing it, but by giving it permission to engage.
Finally, and most importantly, you develop an acceptance practice. You learn to be with wakefulness without resistance. Resistance creates arousal. Acceptance—real acceptance, not resignation—allows your nervous system to settle on its own terms. This is Coué’s principle in action: when you stop opposing your imagination with willpower, the imagination calms. When you stop fighting wakefulness, wakefulness loses its charge.
Why This Works for High Achievers
MBSR isn’t vague or fluffy. It’s structured, evidence-based, and skill-building—which is exactly why high achievers respond to it so well. You’re not being asked to “just relax.” You’re learning to work with your nervous system instead of against it. You’re not failing at sleep—you’re succeeding at being awake mindfully, which paradoxically allows sleep to arrive.
In my practice, I combine MBSR with targeted sleep behavior strategies—stimulus control, sleep compression—within a mindfulness framework. This addresses both the cognitive arousal and the behavioral patterns that reinforce insomnia. But it’s the mindfulness piece—the deep retraining of how you relate to effort, wakefulness, and control—that creates the lasting transformation.
The Real Reason You’re Still Awake
You’ve been solving the wrong problem. You’ve been trying to fix your sleep. The actual issue? Your relationship with being awake. Your resistance to wakefulness is what perpetuates wakefulness.
Everything in your life has rewarded effort, persistence, and trying harder. Sleep is the one domain that requires the exact opposite: surrender, allowing, non-doing. For someone who’s built an identity on achievement, this is deeply uncomfortable. It can feel like giving up. It isn’t.
Sleep medication can offer temporary relief, and I’m not dismissing its place. But medication doesn’t address cognitive arousal or teach your nervous system to downregulate. When you stop taking it, the underlying pattern remains. Research consistently shows that mindfulness-based approaches produce more durable effects—because they change the pattern itself, not just the symptom.
Here’s the truth that might actually give you hope: the same traits causing this problem—your discipline, your commitment, your capacity for follow-through—make you an ideal candidate for MBSR. Once you understand the framework, you’ll bring the same dedication to this practice that you bring to everything else. The difference is you’ll be channeling that energy in the right direction—not toward force, but toward freedom.
What You Can Do Right Now
Tonight
Turn the clock away. Time-checking is one of the most potent triggers for sleep anxiety. Every glance at the clock activates the mental math of catastrophe: “If I fall asleep now, I’ll get four hours and thirty-two minutes.” Remove the trigger.
If you’ve been awake for twenty minutes or more, get up. Go to another room. Do something quiet and unstimulating in dim light. Return to bed only when you feel genuinely sleepy. This is called stimulus control, and its purpose is simple: your bed should mean sleep, not struggle.
When you notice your mind racing, practice observing instead of fixing. Name what you notice: “My mind is active. My chest feels tight. My jaw is clenched.” Don’t try to change any of it. Just notice. This small shift—from fighting to observing—is the seed of everything MBSR teaches.
This Week
Start a worry journal—but not at bedtime. Set aside ten minutes during the day to write down everything your mind wants to process at 2am. Give your brain structured permission to worry on purpose, during waking hours, so it doesn’t hijack your nights.
Practice a five-minute body scan. Lie down, close your eyes, and slowly move your attention through your body from feet to head. Notice sensation—warmth, tension, numbness, pulsing—without trying to relax. This begins retraining your nervous system’s capacity for non-efforting awareness.
Try a nightly revision practice. This is a technique taught by the mystic and teacher Neville Goddard, and it’s one I’ve found remarkably helpful for clients whose minds insist on replaying the day’s unresolved situations at bedtime. Before sleep, mentally review your day from beginning to end—but revise each scene so that every interaction, every outcome, every conversation unfolds exactly as you would have wanted. That frustrating meeting? It went beautifully. The tense exchange with a colleague? It resolved with mutual respect. This isn’t denial—it’s a deliberate act of redirecting your imagination toward resolution rather than rumination. Remember Coué’s principle: the imagination governs your inner state, not the will. By giving your imagination scenes of resolution instead of conflict, you remove the fuel that keeps your mind churning. Many of my clients find that the situations that felt so urgent at 2am simply lose their grip.
For Lasting Change
These practices will help, and I genuinely hope they offer some relief tonight. But lasting transformation requires systematic training—the kind that happens over weeks, not minutes. That’s what MBSR does across eight weeks: it rewires how your brain relates to wakefulness, effort, stress, and control. It doesn’t just give you tools. It changes the person using them.
Ready to Actually Solve This?
I teach Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction because I’ve watched it transform sleep for clients who had genuinely tried everything. The research is clear. The approach is evidence-based. And it works precisely because it addresses what’s actually at the root of your insomnia: not faulty sleep, but the effort and resistance that keep your nervous system locked in overdrive.
Remember Nancy? Eight weeks into MBSR, she told me something I’ve heard many times but that never loses its power: “I stopped trying to sleep. And then I just… slept.” She didn’t become a different person. She learned a different relationship with herself—one built on allowing instead of forcing, presence instead of performance. That shift didn’t just change her sleep. It changed how she moved through her days.
That’s the transformation I’d love to help you experience. Not another strategy to try. Not another technique to perform. A fundamental shift in how you relate to your own mind, your body, and the effort that’s been keeping you stuck.
My 8-week MBSR course is where that shift happens—through live weekly sessions, daily guided practice, and the kind of support that meets you exactly where you are. You can join online or in person.
Learn More About the MBSR Course
If you’re not sure MBSR is the right fit, or if your sleep struggles are tangled up with anxiety, stress, or something deeper you can’t quite name—I offer individual therapy sessions where we can explore what’s actually going on and find the path that makes sense for you.
You’ve spent enough nights at war with your own mind. You don’t have to figure this out alone.
Or start here: Download my free Warrior Spirit Meditation—a powerful guided meditation and hypnosis practice designed for those moments when you’re facing real difficulty and need to reconnect with your own inner strength. It’s not an MBSR technique, but it embodies the same core truth: presence with what is, rather than fighting what isn’t. It won’t cure your insomnia overnight, but it will give you an experience of the kind of grounded, allowing awareness that makes lasting change possible.
Download the Free Warrior Spirit Meditation
You didn’t become a high achiever by accepting defeat. But you also didn’t become one by applying the wrong strategy to the wrong problem.
Sleep requires something fundamentally different from every other area of your life—not effort, but allowing. Not control, but surrender. Not solving, but simply being. Coué knew this over a hundred years ago. Modern neuroscience has confirmed it. And the thousands of people who’ve found relief through mindfulness practice have lived it.
The irony is almost too perfect: once you stop trying to sleep, sleep happens naturally. Your body already knows how. It just needs you to get out of the way.
You’ve solved harder problems than this. You just needed the right framework
