Racing thoughts at night

Why does my mind race when I go to bed?

Because bed is often the first time in the day that nothing else needs you. Through the day, attention is spoken for; at night the lights go out, the phone goes down, and everything that was waiting — the email you did not answer, the conversation you keep replaying, the list for tomorrow — gets its turn.

Then a second layer arrives: thoughts about sleep itself. The psychologist Allison Harvey’s cognitive model of insomnia (2002) describes the loop. Worry raises arousal; arousal makes you watch for signs that you are not sleeping; noticing that you are still awake becomes a new worry — about tomorrow, about how tired you will be — and the cycle speeds up. Much of what makes a night long is not the first thought but the second one, about the first.

None of this is a sign that something is wrong with you. It is what a mind that cares about tomorrow does when it has a quiet room and nothing to hold.

Why can’t I just stop thinking?

Because “stop thinking about it” is itself a task, and holding it means checking whether it is working — which means thinking about the thing again.

In a 1996 experiment, Ansfield, Wegner and Bowser asked people who normally slept well either to fall asleep as fast as they could or to fall asleep whenever they liked. With calm music playing, hurrying worked; under the mental load of rousing marches, the people told to hurry took longer to fall asleep. The same effort that works for most things works against sleep, and Harvey’s model counts deliberately suppressing thoughts among the habits that keep insomnia going.

So the useful question is not how to empty your mind. It is what to give it instead. Why trying to sleep keeps you awake goes further into effort and sleep.

What helps before bed?

Two things have studies behind them, and both work by handling tomorrow before bed, so there is less of it waiting there.

Write tomorrow down

In a 2018 sleep-laboratory study, 57 healthy young adults spent five minutes writing before lights out: half wrote a to-do list for the coming days, half wrote about what they had already done. The to-do group fell asleep significantly faster, and the more specific their list, the faster they fell asleep (Scullin and colleagues, 2018). It was one night, in young adults without sleep problems, but it costs five minutes and a pen.

The detail matters: the list is for things still to do, written specifically — “email Sam about Thursday”, not “work stuff” — so that the mind can stop holding them.

Worry earlier, on paper

A “constructive worry” exercise moves the worrying to the early evening. Write down what is on your mind, and next to each item the next step you could take — even if the step is “nothing tonight”. In a 2006 study of 33 students with insomnia, doing this for five nights lowered how wound up they felt at bedtime, compared with writing the worries down alone (Carney and Waters, 2006).

The trial of cognitive shuffling compared it with a structured problem-solving exercise of this kind and could not tell the two apart, in a sample its authors say was too small to settle it — but shuffling is done in bed, and problem-solving has to be done before it (what that trial showed).

What helps once you are in bed?

Replacing, not suppressing. Give your attention something that fills it gently, so that there is no room left for the worry — and choose something with no stakes and no next step.

• Picture things. In a 2002 study of 41 people with insomnia, those asked to occupy their minds with imagery fell asleep sooner and had fewer, less distressing thoughts before sleep than those given no instructions (Harvey and Payne, 2002).
• Shuffle them. Cognitive shuffling makes the images deliberately unconnected — a pear, a lighthouse, a mitten — so that nothing can turn into a train of thought. A trial of its structured form improved how wound up students felt at bedtime, how hard they tried to sleep, and how well they rated their sleep (Beaudoin and colleagues, 2016).
• Have them read to you. If doing it yourself feels like work, guided cognitive shuffling supplies the words or the scenes so all you do is picture them.
• Skip the counting. Numbers are orderly and need almost no attention, so the worry fits in beside them: why counting sheep rarely works.

What to avoid is anything with a thread to follow — a gripping podcast, a story with a plot, the news — because following is thinking, and a cliffhanger is a reason to stay awake. That is the whole argument for plotless sleep stories.

What if it starts at 3 a.m.?

Waking briefly in the night is normal; what turns it into an hour is usually the thinking that follows — checking the clock, counting the hours left, deciding tomorrow is ruined. Waking at 3 a.m. is normal explains why.

The same rule applies: do not try to stop the thoughts, give them something else. And if lying there has clearly turned into a struggle, get up, go somewhere dim, do something dull, and come back when sleepy — the oldest behavioural advice there is, and the reason the bed is a cue.

When is it more than racing thoughts?

If trouble sleeping has happened most nights for months and is affecting your days, that is worth taking to a doctor. For chronic insomnia, cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is the recommended first treatment, by the American College of Physicians (Qaseem and colleagues, 2016) and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (Edinger and colleagues, 2021).

And if the thoughts themselves are frightening, relentless, or not only at night, talk to a doctor about them rather than about sleep. The techniques on this page are for an ordinary busy mind, not a substitute for care.