You’re About to Fall Asleep… and Suddenly You’re Wide Awake!

Have you ever been seconds away from falling asleep and then suddenly felt your body switch on again, alert and awake as if sleep had completely disappeared, you can book a 30-minute call here:https://calendly.com/chevymermelstein/30min

Related reading:https://www.chevymermelsteinsleepcoach.org/post/why-am-i-so-tired-but-wide-awake-in-bed

I was so impressed this morning by how far I’ve come.

For the last few months, I’ve made one simple change that has had a big impact on my sleep. At night, I shut my phone down completely and I don’t turn it back on again until morning.

No checking messages, no scrolling, no quick look before bed. It sounds small, but it has shifted something in the way my nights feel, calmer, quieter, less interrupted.

What’s interesting is that my husband has been watching this change over time.

I wasn’t teaching it or asking him to do the same thing, it was just something I was doing. But when you share a space with someone, especially at night, habits tend to ripple quietly, and over time I started noticing small shifts. His phone was quieter at night, the ringer was off, and there was generally less engagement with it in the late hours.

Then this morning he told me he had a terrible night.

Around midnight, a message came through.

There was no sound and no vibration, but just the light of the phone lighting up the room was enough to wake him. He saw it, and that was enough.

The message itself wasn’t urgent or dramatic. It was something that could easily wait until morning. But once his mind registered it, it didn’t let go. He started thinking about it, turning it over, organizing what it might mean, what he would need to deal with the next day, and from there sleep never really returned.

And this is something I see so often when it comes to sleep.

We tend to think of sleep as something that should just happen when we get into bed. We finish the day, lie down, close our eyes, and expect the body to switch off. But sleep doesn’t work like that. It is not an on/off system. It is a gradual process, a slow unwinding where the body and mind move through layers of settling.

Your breathing begins to slow down. Your thoughts don’t disappear, but they become less structured, less dominant. Your body starts to feel heavier, less engaged with the outside world, and there is this in-between space where you are no longer fully awake, but not yet asleep either. That space is delicate. It’s where sleep is forming, but not yet stable.

And then something interrupts it.

A sudden noise outside, a dog barking, a thunderstorm rolling in, a child crying, a car screeching in the distance, or even just a phone screen lighting up in a dark room. And in that instant, everything shifts.

Even if you were seconds away from drifting off, the system comes back online.

Awareness returns, thought returns, and the body that was letting go suddenly tightens again. Sleep doesn’t fade gradually in that moment — it disappears.

What surprises people even more is what happens next.

Because falling back asleep is not immediate. The mind doesn’t simply return to where it was. It checks in. It scans. It starts asking questions, what was that, do I need to respond, is something wrong, what do I need to remember for tomorrow. Even when the interruption is small, the brain often treats it as something that needs processing.

And once that processing starts, sleep is no longer the active state. Now the mind is thinking, organizing, planning, and thinking is a very different state from sleeping. So the body has to begin again. It has to slow down again, settle again, let go again, and sometimes by the time it does, the original wave of sleep has already passed.

This is where frustration often builds, not because sleep is broken, but because it had to restart.

There is also this fragile in-between space in the night that we don’t often talk about.

That moment where you are almost asleep, not fully aware anymore, not fully thinking in structured sentences, just drifting. It feels quiet and soft, like the body is already halfway out of the day. But it is also the most sensitive stage of sleep, because you can still be reached there by sound, light, movement, or thought. And it doesn’t take much to pull you out of it. That’s why people often say, “I was just about to fall asleep.” And they were, it just got interrupted at the wrong moment, and had to begin again.

Sleep is not something we force.

It is something that happens when the conditions allow it to continue without interruption. Not when we try harder or analyze it, but when the system is given enough continuity to move through its natural rhythm without being repeatedly pulled back into alertness.

This is why the end of the day matters. Not in a rigid or perfect way, but in the simple understanding that the mind does better when it is not constantly reactivated. Because every interruption, even a small one, asks the system to shift again, and sleep doesn’t like having to restart over and over.

So maybe the question isn’t how do I fall asleep faster, but what keeps pulling me out just as I’m getting there,

and what might change if those interruptions become just a little fewer.