During the day you manage. There are meetings, errands, people. Then you turn the light off and it begins: this morning’s conversation, what you should have said, the bill, the test results, everything that could go wrong on Tuesday. An hour later you are still there.
It is one of the most wearing things there is, because it takes away the one thing that was repairing you.
Why then, of all times
It isn’t chance and it isn’t bad luck. There are three fairly specific reasons.
It is the first moment with nothing to do. All day your attention is occupied. Worry needs room, and at night there finally is some. It isn’t that new thoughts arrive; it is that they stop having competition.
Your body is still switched on. If the day has gone by with the alarm half-lit, that arousal doesn’t go off with the light switch. It takes time. And with the body still up, your head goes looking for something to hold on to.
And going over it feels like it is doing something. This is the key part and the least visible. While you rehearse, you have the sense of working on the problem. That sense is what hooks, in the same way that relief is what hooks in avoidance.
Ruminating isn’t solving
Worth telling apart, because from the inside they feel almost identical and from the outside they are nothing alike.
Solving takes the shape of a question that can be answered: what do I do about this? It ends in something concrete — a call, a date, a decision — and once you have that, it stops. It usually doesn’t take long.
Ruminating takes the shape of a question with no exit: why does this happen to me?, what if it goes wrong?, why did I say that? It doesn’t end in a step. It ends when sleep finally wins or something interrupts you. And the next night it picks up roughly where it left off.
A practical test: if after twenty minutes you have neither a decision nor an action, you weren’t solving anything.
What people usually try, and why it fails
Trying not to think about it. It is everyone’s first move and it goes worst. Setting out not to think about something requires checking whether you are thinking about it, which is a way of thinking about it. The harder you push, the more present it is.
Lying there waiting. After a long stretch awake, the bed stops being associated with sleep and starts being associated with turning things over. Within weeks, getting into it is enough to start the loop.
Catching up in the morning. Sleeping through to mid-morning, or a long afternoon nap, helps today and disorders the following night.
The phone. Less because of the light than because of what you do with it: checking email, looking at the bank, searching symptoms. You hand your head exactly the material it was after.
What does tend to help
A worry slot, deliberately, in daylight. It sounds odd and it works surprisingly well: set aside fifteen or twenty minutes in the afternoon, with paper, and write down whatever is circling. Not to solve it — to park it. When it turns up at night, the answer is “that is already on tomorrow’s list”. It won’t obey first time; with practice, it obeys reasonably often.
Split the list into two columns. What depends on you and what doesn’t. The first becomes a step with a date on it. The second has no solution to look for, and writing it down helps you stop hunting for one.
Get up. If you have been awake more than twenty minutes and your head is going at speed, get out of bed and do something boring in low light until sleep comes back. It costs you something, and it protects the association between bed and sleeping, which is the thing worth looking after over the coming months.
One fixed time to get up. Even after a bad night. It is what puts the body clock back in order more than anything else, and it is the one most often broken.
Bring the body down before the head. Lengthen the out-breath — release the air more slowly than you drew it in — for a few minutes. Not to fall asleep: to lower the arousal you arrived in bed with.
When this is something else
This is about sleeping badly because of going over things. There are conditions that resemble it and need a different look:
- If you wake in the small hours most days and don’t get back to sleep, particularly alongside low mood, no appetite for anything and a weight on your chest, that is worth looking at with someone.
- If you snore heavily, wake up gasping, or feel unrested however many hours you sleep, that is one for a doctor: sleep apnoea is a possibility, and no psychological technique fixes it.
- If the problem is simply having no sleepiness until three in the morning but then sleeping straight through, that may be a shifted body clock rather than anxiety.
- And if you have been on sleeping medication for a while, coming off it is done with whoever prescribed it. Never on your own.
When to ask for help
When it has been weeks. When the next day is paying for it — your concentration, your temper, your patience with the people you love. Or when you notice you are organising your evening around whether you are going to sleep or not.
You don’t have to wait until you are exhausted. This is easier to work on before insomnia settles in as a problem in its own right, running independently of whatever started it.
And it tends to respond quickly: a good part of the work is understanding the mechanism, and understanding it already takes some of the pressure off the night.
Talking it through in English
Fernando Ruiz Martínez is a psychologist and neuropsychologist in Granada (Col. M-39091), working in English or Spanish — useful if this is the sort of thing you can only really explain in your own language. There is no clinic to travel to: sessions are online, or at your home in Granada.
The first conversation is free, by phone or video call. It is a chance to describe how the nights have been going and to decide from there.