I can't leave the bedroom when I wake up during the night because I don't have another room/live in a shared house.

If you wake up and you're feeling wide awake and you're thinking, oh no, here we go again, I need you to leave the bedroom.

Some people tell me how this rule is quite difficult for them, whether it be a mobility issue or whether it be disturbing others in the house or maybe you don't have other rooms. Perhaps you live in a studio flat, for example.

And they say to me, "So what do I do? How do I mark the transition between being awake and being asleep and associating it with all the wrong rooms?" And what I would say to that is even if you just sit up, turn your light on and do a different activity and try to create your bed space into almost like a sofa. So do your bed, put some cushions on it and sit on top of it. Or maybe if you can even get off the bed and sit at a desk or somewhere else in your room, that's really helpful.

But all you're doing is marking the transition. So you're not lying in bed in the pitch black awake. You should only be doing that lying in bed in the pitch black when you're feeling really sleepy and you're just about to go to sleep. Otherwise, try to change the environment any way you can so that your brain starts to understand that there is one sort of environment for sleep and one environment for awake.