Why You're Always Tired (Even After 8 Hours of Sleep)

By Michael Baah — Celebrity Strength & Oncology Coach,

A month ago, I was selected to trial and test a new sleepwear brand, Zed Sleep. It gave me a reason to go back through years of coaching notes on sleep and actually apply them properly, in order, night after night, instead of just knowing them on paper.

What follows isn't a list of tips you could find anywhere. It's the actual sequence I coach clients through: what to fix first, what to add second, and what to leave alone entirely, condensed into one read. I'd normally walk a client through this over several paid sessions. Consider this as £200 worth of actionable coaching, given to you in one sitting, because the order you fix things in matters as much as the fixes themselves.

If you've ever lain there doing the maths, wondering whether you'll still get eight hours if you fall asleep right now, and then woken up the next day just as flat as when you went to bed, this is for you.

Before I go further, I want to say something clearly: if you're waking up multiple times a night to use the bathroom, dealing with night sweats or hot flushes, or your sleep has been disrupted since starting cancer treatment or going through menopause, none of what follows is suggesting that's a habit you need to fix. Those are physiological, not behavioural. I'll address them properly, and separately, near the end, because lumping them in with "just improve your sleep hygiene" is exactly the kind of generic advice I'm trying not to give you.

Why This Isn't Just Another Sleep Listicle

There's a trend right now called "sleepmaxxing", optimising every part of your pre-bed routine. I'm glad it's trending. For most of my career, sleep was the thing clients mentioned last, almost apologetically, after training and diet. Now it's finally being treated like the foundation it always was.

There's also a real clinical term for taking it too far: orthosomnia, becoming so preoccupied with achieving "perfect" sleep, often from obsessively checking tracker data, that the anxiety itself disrupts your sleep. If that sounds familiar, checking your ring or watch before you've even opened your eyes properly, you're not alone. Use the data, don't worship it. Look at weekly trends, not daily scores.

Here's the actual order.

Week One: Fix the Room Before You Fix Anything Else

Most people jump straight to supplements. Don't. If your environment is working against you, no supplement will out-perform it.

Temperature, first. If you've ever wondered why you wake at 3am for no obvious reason, this is one of the most overlooked answers. Most sleep specialists point to roughly 18 to 20°C (65 to 68°F) as ideal for adults. Your body temperature naturally drops as you fall asleep, and a room that's too warm fights that directly.

Before this trial, I'd wake around 3am most nights, overheated, duvet half kicked off, awake for twenty minutes before drifting back off. The kind of broken night that doesn't register as "bad sleep" the next morning but leaves you flat by 3pm anyway. Since switching to Zed's beechwood fibre set, I went from waking like that most nights to roughly one or two nights a week. That's not a perfect fix, and fabric alone won't cool an overheated room, but a breathable layer that regulates heat rather than trapping it made a genuinely measurable difference for me, and it's the cheapest, fastest change on this entire list.

Darkness, second, same week. Streetlight through the curtains, a charging light in the corner, none of it counts as dark enough. Even small amounts of light suppress melatonin. A proper blackout mask closes this gap immediately, no habit building required.

Why this order: these two changes require zero willpower and start working the first night. Get the wins early, before you ask yourself to build any actual discipline.

Week Two: Fix Your Timing, Not Your Supplements

Once your room is sorted, the next highest leverage change is the one people resist most and delay longest: the same wake time, every day, weekends included.

Your circadian rhythm runs on consistency, not hours logged. Wake at a different time every day and you undo the benefit of everything else on this list. I've watched this single change do more for clients than any product I've ever recommended, and it costs nothing.

Yes, even after the big Saturday night out. That's precisely the week it matters most, because that's the week most people abandon it.

Why this order: timing takes about a week to start showing benefit, so it needs to run alongside your new environment, not before it. Otherwise you're asking for discipline before you've felt any reward.

Week Three: Only Now, Consider a Supplement

Most sleep supplement stacks circulating online are unproven or wildly overstated, and most people reach for them first, which is backwards. Fix the free things before you pay for anything.

If you get here and still want support, the combination I use and trust is magnesium glycinate and L theanine, taken around 30 minutes before bed. To be fair to the science: the strongest evidence is for reducing time to fall asleep and easing pre-sleep anxiety, not necessarily for increasing measurable deep sleep, which would need a sleep study to confirm properly. What I can say from experience is that it helps me settle faster and stay settled, rather than lying there running through tomorrow's to-do list.

Melatonin has its place: jet lag, shift work, genuinely disrupted schedules, but it isn't a blanket fix, and dosage varies wildly between products. Use it with intention, not as a nightly default.

The One Most People Never Connect: Alcohol

Worth its own section, because almost everyone's tried this one and misread it. Alcohol may help you drop off faster, but it suppresses REM sleep early in the night, then triggers a rebound of lighter, fragmented sleep later on. That's the actual mechanism behind waking up at 3 or 4am after a few drinks, wide awake for no obvious reason. It's not bad luck. It's biology, and it undoes weeks one and two if you let it.

The Free Layer Most Content Skips Entirely

Once the three weeks above are in place, these cost nothing and compound everything:

• Morning sunlight exposure, one of the strongest regulators of your circadian rhythm

• Cut blue light around two hours before bed, screens suppress melatonin right when it needs to rise

• No caffeine after early afternoon, it lingers far longer than most people assume

• Exercise earlier in the day, training too close to bedtime can rev up stimulating hormones right when you need them winding down

If Your Sleep Problem Isn't a Habit Problem

I promised I'd come back to this properly.

If you're waking multiple times a night to use the bathroom, this is incredibly common: with age, prostate changes, menopause, diabetes, and as a side effect of several cancer treatments. Easing off water before bed helps at the margins, but it won't solve something physiological. Raise it with your GP rather than assuming it's a habit to break.

If you're dealing with night sweats or hot flushes, from menopause or as a treatment side effect, a breathable, temperature regulating sleepwear layer can genuinely help you manage the symptom more comfortably, even though it isn't treating the cause. That distinction matters, and I'd rather be honest about it than oversell a T-shirt as a medical fix.

And if your sleep has been disrupted since starting cancer treatment, chemotherapy, hormone therapy, steroids and radiotherapy related fatigue and insomnia are all genuinely documented, that isn't a failure of routine or willpower. In my clinical work, this comes up constantly, and it's one of the most under-discussed side effects of treatment. The three week sequence above can still help around the edges: a cooler, darker room and consistent wake time support anyone's sleep, including yours, but it supplements your care team's guidance, never replaces it.

The Real Takeaway

This is the sequence, in the order I'd actually walk a client through it: room first, timing second, supplements only if you still need them third, with alcohol as the thing quietly undoing all three if it's not addressed. That order is the part that doesn't show up in a free listicle, and it's the part that actually determines whether this sticks past week one.

Fix what's within your control, in that order. Be honest about what isn't, and take it to the people qualified to help with it.

I say this to every client who tells me it's too late for them, too many bad years of sleep behind them, too set in their ways to change now. It isn't too late. You're not too old to start. You're too important not to.

The goal was never a perfect number on a screen. It was always just: wake up better than yesterday, however small that improvement is.