Recharge to Recover: it's not lazy, it's healing

Restorative sleep is essential for healing.

Before cancer, I never had issues with sleep. After diagnosis, understandably sleep was difficult given the shock and trauma.

In my recovery, sleep has still been an issue. Worries about recurrence, anxiety and memories from the trauma, as well as side effects from treatment, have all played a role in maintaining this.

I’m still working through it, gently and without pressure. Over time, and with small, consistent changes, I’ve noticed things beginning to improve.

My experience is what led me to look more deeply into sleep and its role in our overall health.

During sleep the body supports immune function, tissue repair, and emotional processing. Yet sleep is often disrupted during and after cancer treatment (or other illness or difficult life event), and this can persist for months to years. Rebuilding healthy sleep rhythms is an important part of recovery.

Much of the usual sleep hygiene advice will sound familiar - keeping regular sleep and wake times, reducing screen time 1 hour before bed, avoiding caffeine later in the day, and winding down with something relaxing such as a warm bath. These things help me and they do matter.

However, I’ve learnt to take it one step further.

It can be helpful to keep bed as a space for sleeping only (& intimacy).

This allows the mind & body to associate the bed with sleep and rest rather than wakefulness.

Over time, our brains form associations between places and activities.

If we regularly use the bed for many different things, such as watching television, scrolling on our phones, working or worrying, the brain can begin to associate the bed with wakefulness and mental activity rather than sleep.

Sleep specialists use a technique called stimulus control to help retrain this association. The aim is simple: when you get into bed, your brain learns that this is a place where sleep happens.

Stimulus control is part of a widely used treatment called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), which is recommended in clinical guidelines, including those from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).

What This Looks Like in Practice

To strengthen the link between bed and sleep, sleep specialists often recommend:

• Go to bed only when you feel sleepy, not simply because it is a certain time.

• Use the bed only for sleep and intimacy, not for watching TV, working, or scrolling on your phone.

• If you can’t fall asleep within about 15–20 minutes, get up, go to another room, and do something calm until you feel sleepy again e.g. read a book (repeat this if needed)

• Wake up at the same time each day, even if you had a poor night’s sleep.

These steps help the brain relearn that bed = sleep, rather than bed = wakefulness or worry.

Why This Matters During Recovery

Like myself, for people recovering from illness, sleep patterns can easily become disrupted.

I find that spending long periods awake in bed trying to sleep can sometimes make my insomnia worse.

I gradually rebuilt a simple, consistent sleep routine to restore my brain’s natural sleep cues.

My goal is not to force sleep, but to create the conditions that allow sleep to return naturally. This allows my body and mind to heal – repair, reset, restore.