Imotara

How do I stop overthinking at night when I am trying to sleep?

You mostly do not stop it by trying to stop it. What works better is giving the thoughts somewhere to go before you lie down, and giving your attention something undemanding to hold once you have. Fighting the thinking keeps you awake more reliably than the thinking does.

Why it happens exactly then

Bed is the first point in the day with no input and no task. Your mind does not generate more thoughts at night; it simply has nothing else to do, so you finally hear the ones that were there all along.

Unfinished things are also noisier than finished ones. Anything you have not decided, written down or acted on keeps surfacing, because keeping it active is how you avoid forgetting it.

Why suppressing backfires

Instructing yourself not to think about something requires monitoring whether you have stopped — which is thinking about it. Then you get annoyed at still being awake, and the annoyance is a second problem on top of the first.

Most of the distress of a sleepless night is not the thoughts. It is the arithmetic: how little sleep is left, how bad tomorrow will be.

If you have been lying awake a while

If it feels like twenty minutes or more, get up. Go somewhere dim, do something dull — fold laundry, read something unexciting on paper — and go back to bed only when you feel sleepy. It sounds backwards, and it is one of the core parts of CBT-I: it stops the bed becoming the place where you lie and think.

Leave the clock alone while you do it. Checking the time restarts the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is what keeps you up.

If you wake in the small hours and it starts again

Waking briefly in the night is normal; most people do it several times and never remember. What turns it into a bad night is the thinking that switches on with it.

Do not try to solve anything then. Problems look larger at that hour than they will at breakfast. If it is on tomorrow's list, it can wait there — and if it is not, putting it there is the one thing worth doing before you settle again.

Things you could try now

• • Do a brain-dump an hour before bed — everything unresolved, in a list, no solutions required. The point is that the thought stops needing to hold itself open.
• • If something has a next action, write the next action and nothing more. 'Email the landlord' is enough.
• • In bed, give attention something dull to hold: counting backwards from 300 in threes, or describing a familiar walk in detail.
• • Stop doing the arithmetic. Lying awake rested is not nothing, and one bad night is survivable — the panic about tomorrow costs more than the lost hour.