Why can’t I sleep through the night?

Healthcaretoday, Kheng Kien Soo, Klinik Dr Kheng, sleep, insomnia, trouble sleeping, sleep better, Zinc, Vitamin B6, stress,

Why can’t I sleep through the night?

June 9, 2026

Healthcaretoday, Dr Kheng Kien Soo, Klinik Dr Kheng, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Deep sleep, insomnia, sleep issues, poor sleep, fatigue, dementia, melatonin, Vitamin B6, Zinc, weight gain,

Smartphone blue light can disrupt circadian rhythms and delay sleep onset. Turn off screens at least one hour before bedtime.

By Dr Kheng Kien Soo, Family physician,
Anti-ageing / Aesthetician;
Clinic Dr Kheng,
Kota Kinabalu, Sabah

None of us can live without it. We need it every day. And most of us are deficient of it. It's not a vitamin or a mineral, it's sleep.

An alarming 47 per cent of people have difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep throughout the night, but many more are simply not getting enough for optimal health.

Before the electric light bulb extended our days, most people slept for up to ten hours a night. The figure now hovers around seven and continues to fall. Not only are we sleeping less in the 21st century because we've learned how to extend our daytime, but we also sleep less to get more done.

Cellphone addiction is real and dangerous: Overcoming these addictions isn’t easy, but small, consistent changes can transform your life.

You saw this coming. Teens’ glued-to-their-phone habits are turning many into night owls on school nights — at a time when they need all the sleep they can get.

The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommend teenagers get eight to 10 hours of sleep every night. But more than half of teens are spending up to an hour or more on their phone between the hours of 10pm and 6am on school nights, new research has found.

One of the great mysteries is why we need sleep at all.
During the first three hours of sleep, the body goes into rapid repair mode. This is one of the reasons why, if you are sick, nothing is better than a good night's sleep.

The importance of dreaming
After a couple of hours, we enter the dream state sleep, known as rapid eye movement, or REM, stage 1. REM sleep normally occurs 90 minutes after the onset of sleep, but if we are sleep deprived it may occur within 30 minutes.

Dreaming occurs during REM sleep and most of us have four or more REM periods per night, even though many people have difficulty remembering the dreams that occur in them.

While providing physical rest, sleep may provide the chance to make a 'back-up tape' of the day's events for our large computer, the brain.

Many scientists believe that nutritional deficiency is one reason why poor or no dream recall can occur.

A survey conducted at the Institute for Optimum Nutrition found that more than 40 percent of people had no or very infrequent dream recall. When researching the signs and symptoms of vitamin B6 and zinc deficiency, it was found that alarming proportion of deficient people couldn’t recall their dreams. After supplementation with B6 and zinc, their dream recall returned and they reported their dreams as more vivid.

Clean your brain with sleep
One of the most exciting functions of sleep that we are just beginning to understand is the role it plays in brain health essentially, sleep appears to be the prime time for the brain to clear out waste products and repair itself. This new insight into sleep has important implications for brain health.

Why you are likely not sleeping enough
Everybody loses sleep here and there, and the body can adjust for temporary shortcomings.

Life's inevitable challenges tend to disrupt sleep. Cultivating good sleep habits is important to help you to recover from them like giving yourself time to wind down before bed, going to bed at the same time whenever possible, and going to bed early enough. If you have established healthy sleeping habits, it will be far easier to get back to a routine that will keep you healthy.

Stress, obviously, is a major influence on how well you are able to rest.

Another crucial piece of the sleep puzzle is light. Spending hours each night watching television, catching up on e-mail, or viewing a movie on a mobile device are all pervasive habits that wreak havoc on the body's internal clock, known as the circadian rhythm. This clock rules the sleep-wake cycle, and when it gets out of whack, restorative sleep becomes elusive.

Effects on not sleeping enough
Heightened stress levels
When your body is stressed, adrenaline increases your heart rate and blood pressure, makes your muscles tense, and slow your digestive processes. Chronic high stress can lead to a variety of health problems, including headache, indigestion, increased anxiety, depression and high blood pressure.

Weight gain and pre-diabetes
Poor sleep can increase your risk of gaining body fat, impair your ability to lose excess pounds, and make it harder for you to maintain your ideal weight.

When you're sleep deprived, Leptin, a hormone that signals satiety falls, while Ghrelin which signals hunger rises, making you hungrier the next day.

Weakened immune system
Poor sleep increases your chances of getting sick. In 1988, one of the first studies to establish a link between sleep and the immune response found that people who awakened more often during the first cycle of sleep tended to have lower levels of natural killer cells.

Accelerated aging
Poor sleep likely contributes to premature aging. If you don't sleep deeply, your levels of human growth hormone (HGH) plummets.

Advanced tumor growth
Poor sleep increases your likelihood of getting cancer. This may be because melatonin appears to have anticancer properties. Melatonin is thought to play a role in inhibiting the proliferation of a wide range of cancer cell types and triggering cancer cell apoptosis (cell destruction). But many habits of modern life, such as sleeping in around with lights or next to a high-EMF clock radio or not getting enough bright-sunlight exposure in the day time, suppress normal melatonin rhythms.

Increased risk of heart disease and dying
Your circadian system "drives" the rhythm of biological activity in all the tissues and cells of your body. Poor sleep disrupts the master clock, which then disrupts the normal functioning of those tissues and cells.

The link between sleep and brain health
Your brain actually has its own unique waste disposal system. Called the glymphatic system, it piggyback on the blood vessels in your brain. The "g" in glymphatic is a nod to glial cells, the brain cells that manage this system. By pumping cerebrospinal fluid through your brain's tissues, the glymphatic system flushes the waste from your brain back into your body’s circularity system.

During sleep, the glymphatic system becomes ten times more active than during wakefulness. One particular waste product that this study identified is removed in significant greater quantities during sleep. That amyloid-beta, the protein that forms the notorious plaques found in the brain of Alzheimer’s patients.

Give room for your nervous system to unwind
If your bedtime is 10pm, that means no coffee or other caffeinated drinks after noon. Cutting caffeine this early gives your nervous system the space to relax and wind down naturally, instead of keeping you alert when we’d like our bodies to be preparing for rest.

About 3 hours before bed, it’s time to finish eating and drinking alcohol. For a 10pm bedtime, dinner would ideally end around 7pm.

This helps your body focus on recovery instead of digestion while sleeping, supporting better metabolic health and giving your nervous system a signal that the day is winding down.

Optimize your circadian rhythm
The master clock synchronizes its twenty-four hours pattern by the light-dark cycle of the sun. Our ancient ancestors slept at night in darkness and stayed awake in the exposure of bright daylight. But today most of us stay up late at night and use bright artificial light sources. That fools our master clock into thinking it's day when it's actually night, and therefore it doesn't cue the sleepiness that guides you to get in bed.

The role of melatonin
Melatonin helps set the body's circadian rhythm. It is released when the brain perceives dim light, and it contributes to initiation and maintenance of sleep. In a natural environment, free of artificial light; from light bulbs, television and smartphones, melatonin levels begin to rise around 7pm., then stay elevated until 7am.

To sleep better, use light wisely
Before advent of electricity, the only light available at night was moonlight, firelight and candlelight. All of those forms of light emit short wavelengths, which the human eye perceives as yellows, oranges, and reds. Fast-forward to now, we not only burn lights all night but are watching television, using computers, and starring at smartphones.

The problem is that nearly all these kinds of light emit longer wavelengths, in the blue light spectrum.

Your body responds to wavelengths in different ways. Studies have shown that exposure to blue light at night delays the nightly peak of melatonin that triggers sleepiness. Conversely, exposure to red light at night has a negligible impact on melatonin. So if you need to go use a light at night to find the bathroom, it's best to use a red light or flashlight.

Use electronic mindfully at night
The glow of television, smartphones, and laptops can all upset your circadian rhythm and promote wakefulness. Turn them all off at least an hour before bed.

Use blackout curtains to shut out ambient light from outside. Turn digital alarm clocks away from you so the glow doesn't keep you up.

Eat for sleep
Promoting your circadian rhythms by monitoring your exposure to light is not the only tool at your disposal. Many nutrients also play a role in healthy sleep. Aim to eat the following foods several times a week.

Almonds
Almonds are rich in magnesium, which is needed for quality sleep.

Avocados
Avocados are an excellent source of potassium. Potassium works synergistically with magnesium to improve sleep, among other things.

Chamomile tea
Drinking a cup of chamomile tea before bed is more than just a folk remedy. Researchers have found that it's associated with a rise in glycine, a chemical that has sedative properties and that promotes muscle relaxation. Try drinking a cup an hour before bedtime.

Walnuts
Walnuts benefit your sleep in two ways. They are good sources of tryptophan, an amino acid that helps your body make melatonin. And they contain their own melatonin.

Sleep-enhancing pills
At certain times, however, you may need a little extra help: you may be travelling between time zones, for example, or going through a stressful period in your life.

Numerous scientific studies have found that melatonin supplements help people fall asleep faster and stay asleep, experience less restlessness, and prevent daytime fatigue. Those who struggle to get to sleep usually take higher doses such as 3mg at bedtime.

Seven steps to supersleep
If you're having problems getting to sleep, staying asleep or getting enough sleep, there are seven steps you can take to improve your sleep life:

Get to the bottom of any factors interrupting your sleep.
Manage your stress levels.
Maintain even blood sugar levels throughout the day.
Balance your minerals, supplementing magnesium glycinate.
Balance your sleep neurotransmitters, serotonin and melatonin.
If necessary, use natural sleep aids such as kava kava or melatonin.
Cellphone addiction - try this: 2 hours before bed is screen-free time. Phones, television, computers, and even e-readers can keep your mind stimulated. Screens are blue light which sends daylight signals to the eyes, impairing circadian rhythm and keeping the brain in an active, alert state. I suggest dimming lights or doing a relaxing evening routine to signal safety and calm to your body.

1 hour before bed, stop working.
Whether it’s work, cleaning, or any task that keeps your brain running, give yourself space to unwind.

Even if you swap this with screen-free time (meaning we end work 2 hours before bed yet maybe read a paper book for another hour), the goal is the same. We must allow the mind to prepare for rest.

Finally, zero, and this one happens in the morning. It means zero snoozes of the alarm clock. Hitting snooze disrupts your rhythm and negates some of the benefits you worked for the night before. Waking consistently trains your circadian rhythm and reinforces healthy sleep patterns.

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