Sleep for Musicians: Why It’s Hard and How to Make It Easier

Why Music Work Can Make Sleep Hard

There are a lot of reasons sleep can get pushed around when your work happens at night, on the road, or according to someone else’s schedule.

• Late nights. Shows, load-out, travel, conversations, and food can move your whole evening later than your body would naturally prefer.
• Adrenaline. Performing can be stimulating. Even when the show went well, it can take a while for your brain and body to settle afterward.
• Travel. Different beds, rooms, cities, time zones, and noise levels can make it harder to feel settled enough to sleep.
• Schedule changes. A stretch of late nights followed by a few days at home can leave you trying to shift your sleep schedule back and forth.
• Work that follows you home. Messages, booking, social media, finances, songwriting, editing, and planning can make it difficult to feel like the workday has actually ended.

Research on professional musicians has found relatively short sleep duration and signs of disrupted sleep in some groups of musicians. Irregular work and sleep schedules are one part of the picture.

The Basics That Actually Help

You do not need a perfect bedtime routine. A few simple things can make sleep easier, especially when the rest of your schedule is unpredictable.

Your Bed Is for Sleep and Sex

This is one of the simplest sleep recommendations, and one that can be surprisingly helpful.

Whenever possible, keep the bed associated with sleep and sex rather than work, entertainment, or hours of scrolling. That does not mean you can never watch a show in bed or answer a message from your pillow. Real life is not a sleep laboratory.

But if you are having trouble sleeping, it can help to make your bed a place your brain mostly associates with settling down and sleeping.

If You’re Awake, Give Yourself a Change of Scenery

If you are lying there wide awake, getting more anxious or frustrated, checking the clock, or worrying about how tired you are going to be tomorrow, it may help to get out of bed for a little while.

Keep the lights low and do something quiet. Read a few pages, listen to something calming, sit somewhere comfortable, or do something else that does not require much from you. When you start feeling sleepy again, head back to bed.

The idea is not to turn sleep into another task you have to perform correctly. It is simply a way to keep your bed from becoming associated with hours of wakefulness and worry.

And of course, this looks different on a tour bus, in a hotel room, or when you are sharing a room with other people. The general idea matters more than doing it perfectly.

Napping Is Its Own Thing

Naps can be useful, especially when your schedule does not leave you with one long, uninterrupted block of sleep. But a 15-minute nap and a 60-minute nap are doing somewhat different things.

One reason is that the longer you sleep, the more likely you are to move into deeper stages of sleep. Waking from deeper sleep can leave you temporarily groggy or foggy. That feeling is called sleep inertia.

So the right nap depends partly on what you need. Are you trying to get a quick boost before soundcheck? Are you catching up after a very short night? Do you have somewhere to be in 20 minutes, or do you have an afternoon with nothing scheduled?

There is no single perfect nap length. Think about how much sleep you have been getting, what you need to be able to do afterward, and how much time you actually have.

What Changes When You’re on Tour?

You cannot always control when the show ends, when the bus moves, or where you will sleep. You can still make some parts of the situation a little easier.

• Protect the sleep opportunity you have. If your only real chance to sleep is from 3 a.m. to 10 a.m., that block still counts. It does not have to happen at conventional hours to be worthwhile.
• Bring a few familiar things with you. An eye mask, earplugs, white noise, comfortable sleep clothes, or a familiar pillow can make different sleeping environments feel more predictable.
• Give yourself a transition after the show. You may be exhausted and still feel wired. A little time to come down from the stimulation can make it easier to settle.
• Think about what helps and what gets in the way. Caffeine, alcohol, heavy meals, bright light, and a lot of stimulation close to bedtime can all affect how easily you settle into sleep.
• Use naps intentionally. A short nap before a late show and a longer recovery nap after a night of very little sleep are different tools. Both can have a place.

And Yes, Music Can Be Part of the Wind-Down

Advice about avoiding screens before bed can feel a little unrealistic when your phone is also your calendar, your communication system, your work equipment, and half your social life.

It may be more useful to think about whether what you are doing is activating or settling you.

Listening to a familiar album at low volume may be relaxing. Answering comments about the show, checking streaming numbers, watching performance footage, or editing a mix at 1 a.m. probably keeps your brain in work mode.

You do not need to make bedtime silent and joyless. You are simply looking for a few familiar signals that tell your brain the workday is winding down.

When Sleep Problems Keep Going

A rough stretch of sleep after a festival, tour, deadline, or run of late nights is one thing. If sleep has been difficult for weeks or months, it is worth looking a little deeper.

If you regularly have trouble falling asleep, wake repeatedly, wake much earlier than you want, feel exhausted despite spending enough time in bed, or find yourself relying heavily on alcohol, medication, or other substances to sleep, consider talking with a healthcare professional.

Loud snoring, gasping or choking during sleep, morning headaches, or significant daytime sleepiness are also worth mentioning to a medical provider.

Sleep problems can have many different causes. Sometimes changing routines helps. Sometimes there is a medical issue, a circadian rhythm problem, another sleep disorder, medication effect, or several things happening at once.