Why Trying Harder to Fall Asleep Can Keep You Awake Longer

It's a quarter past eleven. You were falling asleep on the couch an hour ago, and now you're in bed, eyes shut, lying very still, doing it properly. And a small calculation is running. If I'm asleep now, that's six hours and forty minutes. Somewhere in there, falling asleep stopped being something happening to you and became a job with a deadline. This episode looks at why that backfires. Sleep is involuntary, so it can't be done on purpose, and researchers have measured how hard people work at it. One experiment found that normal sleepers told to fall...