The Reminder I Set for Myself and Ignored for a Year

On the small acts of self-abandonment we call getting on with it.

I have a confession.

For just over a year, every night at 10pm, Alexa reminded me to go to bed.

And for just over a year, I ignored her.

Not dramatically. Not rebelliously. Just… one more thing to finish. One more message to reply to. One more page. One more episode. The gentle chime would sound and I would think yes, soon — and then somehow it would be midnight, or later, and I would finally close my eyes already behind, already borrowing from tomorrow.

I am a doctor. I know what sleep deprivation does to the body, to cognition, to immunity, to mood, to the eyes I spend my days looking into. I have said the words rest is medicine to more patients than I can count.

And I was setting an alarm to remind myself to rest — and ignoring it. For a year.

I’m not telling you this because I’ve fixed it. I’m telling you this because I’m working on it. And because somewhere in that small, almost embarrassing detail is something I recognise in almost every patient I see.

We all know. And knowing, it turns out, is almost entirely beside the point.

For a long time I thought the problem was discipline. That if I just committed more firmly, structured my evenings better, put the phone down with more intention — I would finally rest.

I was wrong.

What I eventually discovered, through the work I now call neurosomatic intelligence, was that I didn’t have a sleep problem. I had a safety problem.

My nervous system had never received permission to stop. Not from anyone else — that’s not where permission lives. But from myself. From the part of me that sets the conditions for rest, that signals to the body: you can put it down now. Nothing will fall apart. You are allowed to be still.

That permission had never been granted.

And without it, no reminder — not Alexa, not my own clinical knowledge, not exhaustion itself — was ever going to be enough.

I see it in my clinic every day.

The patient who comes in with tired, aching eyes — screens, they say, it’s probably the screens — and when I suggest rest, something flickers across their face. Not disagreement exactly. Something closer to genuine bewilderment. Rest? As though I’ve suggested something faintly exotic.

I had a patient once — a television presenter — who came in with contact lens keratitis. An infection that required, non-negotiably, a contact lens holiday. She was furious. Not with the diagnosis. With me. For not finding a way around it. She could not be seen on camera in glasses. That was simply not possible. The cornea, apparently, would have to wait.

She didn’t come back. She found someone else, I imagine. Someone who found a way to tell her what she needed to hear.

And I understood her — more than she knew. Because I had my own version of that story. Mine just lived in the quiet of my bedroom at 10pm, when a small voice said stop and I said not yet. Every single night. For a year.

We are all, in our own way, keeping the lenses in.

The mother who hasn’t slept properly in months but cannot justify rest because everyone needs something. The professional who hasn’t taken a real holiday in years because things will fall apart without them. The person scrolling at midnight who is genuinely exhausted and genuinely cannot stop.

This is not weakness. This is not poor self-discipline.

This is a nervous system that never learned that stillness is safe.

That rest is not a reward for finished work — because the work is never finished.

That the permission to stop does not come from the completed to-do list, or the approval of others, or the absence of need around you.

It has to come from inside. From a conscious, embodied, sometimes hard-won decision to tell your own nervous system:

You are safe to rest now. I’ve got us.

That is not a small thing. For many of us — for me — it is the work of years.

But it begins with noticing. The reminder you keep ignoring. The signal you keep overriding. The small sustained moment of not listening to yourself that feels like nothing — and accumulates into everything.

The body has been speaking.

It has been speaking for a long time.

The question was never whether we could hear it.

The question is whether we finally believe we are worth listening to.