How to stop overthinking at night

You were fine all day. You got into bed. And within about four minutes your brain opened a file you have not thought about since Tuesday and began working through it in forensic detail, including the conversation from 2014.

Almost everybody does this and almost everybody assumes it is a personal failing. It is not. It is a fairly predictable consequence of how the day is built.

Why the mind picks night

Three things line up at once.

The distractions stop. All day there is noise, work, people, a phone. Worry needs an empty room and bed is the first one it gets. The thoughts were not absent during the day, they were drowned out.

You are tired, and tired brains regulate worse. The part of you that puts a worry down and says not now is effortful, and it is depleted by evening. Late at night you have the same thoughts with less capacity to manage them.

There is no possible action. Most worry is problem-solving that has nowhere to go. At two in the morning you cannot ring anyone, send anything or fix anything, so the loop runs without ever reaching an end. The mind treats unresolved as unfinished, and keeps returning.

What does not work

Telling yourself to stop. Trying not to think about it. Both increase it, reliably, which is one of the more frustrating findings in psychology.

Lying there determined to sleep also backfires, because effort and sleep are incompatible. And checking your phone hands your brain new material at the exact moment it was running out.

What actually helps

These come from cognitive behavioural approaches to insomnia and worry, and they work on the mechanism rather than on willpower.

Give the worry an earlier appointment. Fifteen minutes in the early evening, same time each day, sitting up, with paper. Write down what is unresolved. When it arrives at midnight, you are not suppressing it, you are postponing it to a slot that exists. That distinction is what makes it work, and it takes about a fortnight to take effect.

Write it down rather than continue it. Keep paper by the bed. A large part of the loop is the fear of forgetting. Written down, it is held somewhere other than your head.

Separate worry from planning. Ask one question: is there an action, and can I take it now? If yes, write the action. If no, it is not problem-solving, it is rumination wearing problem-solving\u2019s clothes, and naming that weakens it.

Get out of bed. The hardest advice and the most effective. If you have been awake and looping for twenty minutes, leave the bed. Sit somewhere dim, do something dull, return when sleepy. Staying teaches your brain that bed is where thinking happens.

Use the body, because the mind is not currently listening. Slow breathing with a longer exit than entrance. Four in, six or seven out, for a few minutes. It works on the nervous system directly rather than by argument.

Move the phone. Not for the blue light, which is overstated, but because of what is on it.

When it is worth more than technique

Techniques manage a common problem. Some situations are more than that, and are worth taking to someone.

• It has gone on for months and is affecting how you function in the day.
• The worry has a clear subject that is not resolving, such as a relationship, a decision, or something unsaid.
• You wake with dread before any thought has even formed.
• There is a specific memory the mind returns to.
• You are using alcohol or something else to get to sleep.

That last one is worth being honest about with a doctor, without embarrassment. It is extremely common and it makes sleep worse in the second half of the night, which tends to make the whole pattern harder.

The thing underneath

Persistent night worry usually has a subject, even when it presents as a hundred unrelated things. An unmade decision. A conversation not had. Something being carried that has no hour in the week allocated to it.

Which is a reasonable description of what a session is: one hour, at a sensible time of day, with someone whose job is to help you look at it. Most people find the nights settle once the thing has somewhere else to go.