How to stop overthinking at night

All day the thought had nowhere to land. Now it’s 12:40, the room is dark, and it has the floor: the email you didn’t answer, the thing you said at lunch, the appointment you haven’t booked, the bigger question underneath all of them. You’ve told yourself to stop three times. Each time it came back with a new item.

What’s actually happening

The night doesn’t create the thoughts. It removes everything that was drowning them out. When Allison Harvey compared people who struggle to fall asleep with people who don’t, the poor sleepers’ bedtime thinking was more focused on worries and problems, more likely to be about something that had happened that day or about not sleeping, and felt more occupying, less intentional and longer-lasting than the good sleepers’ [1]. Nobody in that study chose to review their day at midnight. It’s what a mind with open items does when nothing else is asking for its attention.

And open items stay open. As the authors of a bedtime-writing study put it, unfinished tasks are known to remain at a high level of activation in the mind, spurring automatic thoughts about themselves [2]. That’s useful at 3 p.m. when you can act on them. At 12:40 a.m. it’s just a list you can’t cross anything off.

Why it doesn’t stop on its own

Three reasons, all of them normal.

Going over it doesn’t settle it. Reviewing decades of research, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema and colleagues found that rumination — going over the same thing again and again — makes low mood worse, makes problems feel less solvable and gets in the way of actually doing anything about them [3]. At night that last part is guaranteed: there is nothing you can do about the email until morning, so every pass ends where it started.

Telling yourself to stop backfires. In a famous experiment, people asked not to think about a white bear couldn’t do it — and afterwards thought about the bear more than people who had simply been asked to think about it [4]. “Don’t think about work” is the same instruction. Notice, though, the study’s other finding: people who were given one specific thing to think about instead were less preoccupied with the bear afterwards. That’s the principle behind everything below.

Then you start worrying about not sleeping. Harvey found this was one of the poor sleepers’ distinctive topics [1]. It’s a loop inside the loop: the thinking keeps you awake, being awake becomes the new thing to think about.

What actually helps

Not emptying your mind — that isn’t available. Giving it one specific thing to do that ends.

Get the open items out of your head and onto something

In a sleep laboratory at Baylor, 57 healthy adults spent five minutes writing before lights-out. Half wrote a list of everything they needed to do over the next few days; half wrote about things they’d already done. The to-do-list writers fell asleep in about 16 minutes on average; the other group took about 25. And the more specific the list, the faster its writer fell asleep [2]. The volunteers were healthy young adults without sleep problems; the authors think the technique should carry over to the occasional bad night most of us have, and call for a trial in people whose trouble is persistent. Their reading of why it worked is the part to hold on to: the writers wrote their unfinished tasks down instead of mentally going over them [2]. The list holds the item so your mind can let go of it.

Go one step further when you can. In a study of 33 college students who had trouble sleeping, those who spent five nights writing down their worries along with possible solutions felt less mentally wound-up at bedtime than those who wrote down the worries alone [5]. Our own reading of that: you don’t need the whole solution at midnight. A next step will usually do. Email the landlord tomorrow at 9. Book the appointment on the way to work. This is what the app’s “real situation” path does: the thought, then a plan, then a date, so it’s parked somewhere that isn’t your pillow.

If it’s a worry rather than a task, name it and weigh it

Some of what shows up at night isn’t a to-do item. It’s a verdict: “I’m falling behind everyone.” You can’t schedule that. You can name what it’s doing to you — anxious, a bit ashamed — and how strongly. In a brain-imaging study, putting a name to the emotion in an upsetting image quieted the amygdala, the part of the brain that raises the alarm, compared with other ways of engaging with the same images [6]. Then two short lists: what supports the thought, and what doesn’t. At 12:40 the second list is usually longer than the thought would have you believe. How to question a negative thought walks through the whole sequence.

Talk to yourself by name

Ethan Kross and colleagues found that people who talked themselves through a stressful situation using their own name or “you” — the way they’d talk to a friend — felt less distress, handled it better and dwelt on it less afterwards [7]. It sounds odd and it’s worth trying literally: “Sam, what can you do about this right now? Nothing. What’s the first thing tomorrow? Email the landlord. Done.” You’re giving the thought the one thing it wanted — an ending — in a voice that isn’t the one keeping you up.

Do it before bed, not in bed

This part is our own suggestion, not a research finding. The people in the sleep-lab study wrote before lights-out, not after an hour of staring at the ceiling. Give the ten-minute version a slot in your evening — kitchen table, lights on, phone or notebook — and when the thinking starts anyway once you’re lying down, do the one-minute version: get up, write the sentence and its next step, lie back down. The point is that the loop has somewhere to end other than sleep finally winning.

When it’s worth talking to someone

Everyone has a loud night now and then. If it’s most nights for weeks, if you’re dreading bed, or if the thoughts that come are about harming yourself, that’s more than a list before bed is meant to carry — please talk to a professional, or to someone you trust. In the US you can call or text 988 at any hour; elsewhere, look up your local line.

The loud nights are your mind trying to close what the day left open. Give it a way to do that on paper, and it will, more often than not, let you sleep.

How aMind helps

The move that works at night is getting the thing out of your head and giving it an ending, and aMind is built around exactly that fork. You write down what’s keeping you up, and the app asks whether it describes a real situation. If it does, you go to a plan of action with a date on it — which is the bedtime-writing finding in practical form: a worry that has been turned into a scheduled task stops needing to be rehearsed at 2am. If it doesn’t, you work through the evidence, name what you feel, tap the thinking patterns and write a fairer version. Either path ends, which is the part that lets you put the phone down. Entries stay on your phone, and if the same worry turns up in History three Tuesdays running, that is worth knowing too.