Margaret Thatcher, who was known for sleeping only four hours a night, is often credited with saying “Sleep is for wimps!” But sleep is actually work. Putting down the phone, setting aside personal or political worries—these require discipline. True relaxation calls for training.

Sleep coaches used to treat mainly newborns (and their exhausted parents). But recently, as anxieties about sleep have spiked, grown-ups have found they need help with their habits too. A Gallup poll from 2023 found that 57 percent of Americans think they would feel better with more sleep, up from just 43 percent in 2013. Only about a fourth of those surveyed reported getting the commonly recommended eight or more hours per night—down from 34 percent 10 years prior.

Sleep professionals are seizing the opportunity to help adults realize their dream of waking up rested. WIRED spoke to a sleep consultant who, after years of working with kids, tapped into that underserved population. She says it’s entirely possible to transform daytime and nighttime habits to optimize for good sleep. Why not start tonight?

Usually, an adult comes to me with one of two things: First, a major life event—work stress, having a baby, losing a parent, a relationship ending—that destabilizes their system. Sleep is always the first thing to go. The second is that they have a chronic pattern. There are people who’ve really struggled with sleep since childhood, and then it becomes a part of how they see themselves. They’ve tried everything, and then they say, “I’m an insomniac.”

In both cases, they’re exhausted. I always laugh, because when I’m cornered at a dinner party it’s like, “Oh, I just have a quick question. I haven’t slept through the night in 19 years.”

I’ve been a sleep consultant for over 20 years. I started my child sleep practice after getting my master’s in clinical psychology. I was working with a lot of parents, and I really started to notice a common issue: Their children’s sleep issues were literally pushing them to the brink of divorce.

Even once I got their kids to be fabulous sleepers, the parents were still struggling due to long-standing habits from way before their kids arrived. That’s when I realized I needed to help the adults too.

There are camps: trouble falling asleep or trouble waking up at night—or both. So that’s my job: to unravel that mystery of what’s keeping someone up at night. Some of the toughest cases are people who come in only focusing on their nighttime habits and don’t disclose things happening during the day.

One of my clients had trouble sleeping through the night for years. We realized that they consumed most of their calories at night, and nothing during the day. So they kept waking up to eat, and that completely dysregulated their system.

Another client, a woman who exercised all the time and drank 200 ounces of water a day, never made the connection that she was getting up to pee literally every hour. We had to diminish the amount of water she drank and have her stop drinking at a certain hour.

Sometimes people actually just stop functioning. I’m thinking about a mom who says, “I just forgot to clip my child’s seatbelt on in my car.” “I put my keys in the refrigerator.”

I start with the basics. Of course, we’re doing sleep hygiene, but that’s anything that you can Google: Get blackout shades, have a sleep sanctuary. Most people think they have a good setup, but their habits or their environment are working against them. That’s where coaching helps, because I can spot what they’re missing.

People have these stories that they’ve told themselves, like, “If I sleep, then I’m not working hard enough” or “I’m young and I don’t need that much sleep.” What’s the new story that you can tell yourself about sleep? From there, I use a lot of journaling, cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, mindset work, breath work.

I typically work with people in 12 sessions over a three-month period. In between sessions, I follow up. It’s a lot of texting. A lot of the time their friends and coworkers are tired of hearing that they’re not sleeping and tune them out. I don’t tune out.

Self-judgment is the sleep killer. You’re up at night like, “I’m failing. I’m not going to have a good day.” But sleep’s a birthright. It’s something we’re supposed to do to survive.

We’re overstimulated by screens, social media, constant notifications, the 24-hour news cycle, doomscrolling—this just floods our brain with cortisol, which is adrenaline, and then it perpetuates anxious thinking.

A lot of us weren’t taught how to self-soothe when we were little. Let’s say you were a kid who had trouble sleeping, or you co-slept with your parents. When we become adults, it becomes a harder process. Most people grab their phones and doomscroll. Instead of actually dealing with how they feel, they want to mask how they feel. And then you start looking through the news, and it’s like a spark plug to your anxiety.

I always say, “Let’s have some designated worry time” so that I’m not taking away worry from people. I’ll give you an hour to just worry to your heart’s desire, just get it out. When you wake up at night and you start thinking, “How am I going to pay the mortgage? What’s happening in the world?” you can say, “You know what? This isn’t the right time to do this.”

Some people are like, “Oh, this has just been going on for so long, forget it.” We are fully capable of changing our situations and our sleep. It’s never too late.

—As told to Elana Klein