Having laid out the link between sleep and pain, and explored what happens in the nervous system, one question remains: why does this cycle keep going, week after week, for so many people?
The answer is rarely a single big factor. It's more often a set of daily habits, often seen as harmless, that keep the nervous system in a state incompatible with truly restorative sleep.
Screens Before Bed: More Than Just Blue Light
There's a lot of talk about blue light from screens and its effect on melatonin. That's real, but it's only part of the problem. The other part, often overlooked, is the cognitive stimulation itself — reading messages, following stressful news, watching content that grabs your attention — which keeps the brain active exactly when it should be slowing down.
Many of my patients also associate screens with a prolonged forward head posture — a mechanical factor that adds to the purely neurological effect.
Chronic Stress and Invisible Muscle Tension
Stress doesn't just build up 'in your head.' It translates very concretely into background muscle tension, often around the neck, shoulders and jaw — tension that many people only notice once it crosses a certain threshold.
This chronic muscle tension, maintained day after day, contributes both to the pain felt and to the difficulty falling into deep sleep, since the body never truly receives the signal to let go.
The Habits That Seem Harmless But Keep the Cycle Going
A few common examples: checking your phone as soon as you wake up in the middle of the night (which reactivates cognitive alertness), very irregular bedtimes from one day to the next, or systematically pushing back the moment to 'wind down' until the very last minute, right before turning off the light.
None of these habits is dramatic on its own. It's their repetition, combined with the mechanisms covered in the previous article, that keeps the cycle going over time.
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This isn't about changing everything at once, or chasing a 'perfect' evening. It's mostly about identifying, among these habits, the ones that apply to you most directly.
In the final article of this series, we'll look at concrete strategies for acting on this cycle — with no demand for perfection, but with levers that are genuinely applicable day to day. Until then, just one thing to notice this week: at what point each evening do your eyes and attention finally settle, before fatigue takes over?