Insomnia and the Nervous System: How to Calm Your Body for Sleep

Insomnia: when the body is tired, but doesn’t know how to stop.

Do you know this moment? The day ends, you are tired to the bone, you lie down in bed… and your body refuses to switch off the lights. Thoughts race, your heart beats a little faster than it should, your legs can’t settle. Or you fall asleep, but wake at three in the morning and can’t get back to sleep.

Insomnia is often treated as a problem of the mind: “don’t think so much”, “don’t look at your phone”. That advice has its value. But my work with the body has taught me something else: very often sleep doesn’t come because the nervous system doesn’t yet feel safe enough to let go. In this post we’ll look at what science says about insomnia and the nervous system, and I’ll share a gentle ritual you can try tonight, before sleep.

Sleep Cannot Be Forced

Sleep is one of the few things in life that, the harder you try, the further it moves away. You can’t order your body: “sleep now!”. Sleep only comes when the body feels calm enough to release control.

Our nervous system has two main directions. One keeps us awake, alert, ready for action: the sympathetic system, the one of “fight or flight”. The other slows us down and helps us digest, rest, heal and sleep: the parasympathetic system. To fall asleep, the body needs to shift gently from the first to the second.

When we have lived under stress for a long time, with endless work, financial worries, family responsibilities or difficult experiences the body still holds, this shift becomes harder. The body stays “on guard”, even when we are lying in the dark.

Insomnia and the Nervous System: What Science Says

Sleep researchers have a name for this state: hyperarousal. In a well-known 2010 scientific review, Dieter Riemann and his colleagues gathered studies from different fields (measures of the autonomic nervous system, stress hormones, brain waves, brain imaging) and concluded that people with chronic insomnia show higher levels of arousal, not only at night but also during the day.

In other words: insomnia is often not just a “night problem”. It is a body that stays switched on all the time, and night is simply when we notice it most.

According to the American College of Physicians (ACP), about 6 to 10 percent of adults have insomnia that meets diagnostic criteria, and many more go through periods of poor sleep. So if this is happening to you, you are not alone at all.

How the Body Feels Hyperarousal

You might recognise it in signs like these:

The body is tired during the day, but “wired” in the evening.
Your jaw, shoulders or belly don’t release even when you lie down.
Your breath is shallow and fast, mostly in the chest.
You wake with a sense of danger, even though nothing is wrong.
Your mind keeps returning to tasks, conversations or tomorrow’s worries.

None of these mean something is wrong with you. They mean your body has learned to be vigilant. And what has been learned can be learned differently, slowly.

The Breath: A Bridge Between Waking and Sleep

The breath is one of the most direct ways to speak to the nervous system. Unlike your heartbeat, you can slow your breath consciously, and slowing it affects the whole body.

In a 2015 study published in the journal Psychophysiology, Tsai and her colleagues found that people with insomnia had lower vagal activity (the “calming” part of the nervous system) than good sleepers. After 20 minutes of slow breathing before bed, about 6 breaths per minute, the participants with insomnia fell asleep faster, woke less often during the night and slept more efficiently.

I want to be honest with you: this was a small study, with only 28 people. In a 2019 article in Frontiers in Psychiatry, Ravinder Jerath and his colleagues, who support slow breathing as an aid for insomnia, admit themselves that research in this area is still very limited. So the breath is not a magic cure. But it is simple, free, gentle for most people, and it matches what I see in my sessions: when the breath slows, the body begins to let go.

Gentle Attention to the Body

Another door into sleep is attention. Not the effort to “not think”, but gently moving your attention from thoughts to the sensations of the body.

In a 2014 study in the journal Sleep, Jason Ong and colleagues compared two mindfulness meditation programmes with a control group, in 54 adults with chronic insomnia. Both programmes reduced time spent awake at night and pre-sleep arousal, that wired state you feel when you lie down. The programme that combined meditation with specific sleep strategies brought the greatest reduction in insomnia severity. The authors themselves say larger studies are needed.

I love this because it shows something important: the body and our habits go together. It helps to calm the nervous system, and it also helps to give the body rhythm and clear signals.

What Doctors Recommend

It’s good to know: for chronic insomnia, the American College of Physicians recommends cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) as the first treatment. It is a structured approach that includes sleep education, working with thoughts about sleep, and techniques such as limiting time in bed and “stimulus control”. One of its simplest ideas: if you’ve been lying awake in bed for a long time and getting frustrated, get up, go somewhere quiet with low light, and come back only when you feel sleepy. This way the body learns again that the bed is a place for sleep, not a place of struggle.

Somatic work does not replace this. But it can walk alongside it, giving the body a direct experience of safety.

An Exercise for Tonight: The Descent Ritual (15–20 minutes)

Do it in bed or sitting in an armchair, with low light and your phone far away.

1. Arriving (2 minutes)

Lie down and notice the weight of your body. Where does it touch the mattress? Heels, back, head. Let the bed hold you. You don’t need to hold yourself up any more today. Say to yourself, slowly: “The day is over. Now I can rest.”

2. Slow breath (5–10 minutes)

Place one hand on your chest and the other on your belly. Breathe in gently through your nose counting to 4, and breathe out slowly, like a quiet sigh, counting to 6. This gives you about 6 breaths per minute. Don’t force the breath to be deep; it’s enough that it is slow, with the exhale a little longer. If you feel dizzy or uneasy, return to your normal breath. That is completely fine.

3. Scan and release (5 minutes)

With each exhale, bring your attention to one part of the body and let it soften a little: forehead, eyes, jaw (let your tongue drop gently from the roof of your mouth), shoulders, hands, belly, hips, legs. You don’t have to release everything. A little more than before is enough.

4. Sheltering (until sleep comes)

Move into a position that feels protected, for example on your side with your knees slightly bent. Place your hand on your heart or your belly. If thoughts come back, and they will, don’t argue with them. Simply return to the feeling of your hand and the long exhale.

If a lot of time passes and you feel frustration rising, get up for a little while, sit somewhere with low light and do the slow breath again. Go back to bed when sleepiness comes.

Try it for several nights in a row. The nervous system learns through repetition, not through a single night.

Small Habits That Speak to the Body

A steady rhythm: try to get up at roughly the same time every morning, even after a bad night.
Morning light: a few minutes outside, in natural light, early in the day.
An evening wind-down: dim the lights and screens in the last hour before bed, so the body feels that the day is closing.
Movement during the day: a walk, some stretching or gentle shaking of the body to discharge the day’s tension.
Coffee earlier: for many people, afternoon coffee keeps the nervous system more switched on than they think.

When Insomnia Has Deeper Roots

Sometimes the body doesn’t sleep because it never learned that the night is safe. This can happen to people who have lived through trauma, loss or long periods of fear. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, in his book The Body Keeps the Score, describes how the body can keep reacting as if danger is still present, even when the mind knows it has passed.

In these cases, the ritual above can help, but often the body needs more time, gentleness and support. In my sessions in Prishtina, Tirana and online, this is exactly what we work with: slowly, without force, giving the body the experience that it can let go now. For me, calmer sleep is one of the most beautiful signs that the body has begun to feel safer.

When to talk to a doctor: if insomnia lasts more than a few weeks, seriously affects your day, or comes with loud snoring, pauses in breathing during sleep, very low mood or thoughts of harming yourself, please seek help from a doctor or a mental health professional.

A Final Word

Sleep is not something you earn through effort. It is something you allow. Your body knows how to sleep; it has known since you were born. Perhaps it simply needs to hear again, night after night, that now it can rest.

Start small: one longer exhale, one hand on your belly, one gently spoken “the day is over”.

If you’d like to explore this path with support, you can book a session with me in Prishtina, Tirana or online. Or, if you’d like to begin on your own at home, my guide “Healing from Within” (Shërimi nga Brenda) takes you step by step through gentle practices for the body and nervous system.

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This post is for information and inspiration. It does not replace medical or psychological diagnosis or treatment. If you have ongoing sleep problems, please consult a health professional.